Summoned to Tourney
Read Summoned to Tourney Online
Authors: Mercedes Lackey; Ellen Guon
Tags: #Elizabet, #Dharinel, #Bardic, #Kory, #Summoned, #Korendil, #Nightflyers, #Eric Banyon, #Bedlam's Bard, #elves, #Melisande
SUMMONED TO TOURNEY
Mercedes Lackey & Ellen Guon
Dedicated to the memory
of the victims of the Loma
Prieta earthquake, October, 1989,
and other victims of natural
disasters around the world
SUMMONED TO TOURNEY Copyright © 1992 by Mercedes Lackey & Ellen Guon
ISBN: O-671-72122-4
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Published by arrangement with
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 2: As I Walked Through the Fair
CHAPTER 3: My Feet Are Set for Dancing
CHAPTER 6: The Hanged Man’s Reel
CHAPTER 12: Tom O’Bedlam (Reprised)
CHAPTER 13: The Boys of Ballysaclare
CHAPTER 14: The Light in the Window
CHAPTER 17: Anima Urbis: Mount Tam
CHAPTER 18: The Pleasures of Home
CHAPTER 1:
The Mountain Top
Leaves whispered in a breath of breeze, as the early morning sun crept across the hills of San Francisco. A starling perched on the eaves of a four-story townhouse chirped in blissful appreciation of the sun on his back, the gentle breeze, the perfect Northern California morning. This house on a hill had a wonderful view of the Bay and the famous Bridge which was not being sufficiently appreciated by the two-legged being below him. There was still fog on the Bay, though it had crept down the hill just before dawn; the towers of the Bridge rose above the downy sea of fog like the towers of lost Ys. Sun shone out of a near-cloudless sky, making the pearlescent fog glow faintly.
Clank
.
“SonuvaBITCH.”
The starling fluttered its wings in startlement and gazed warily down through the green leaves at the odd, blond-haired, pointy-eared creature that had made both noises. Korendil, Knight of Elfhame Sun-Descending, Magus Minor, Envoy to Elthame Mist-Hold, and firstborn Child of Danaan beyond the Sundering Sea, let out another paint-blistering oath that frightened the starling above him into flight.
Korendil, Knight of Elfhame Sun-Descending, was not communicating well with the hot tub.
He considered kicking it, remembered that he was barefooted, and thought better of the idea. He leveled an angry glance at the recalcitrant object instead.
“I primed your pump,” he said to it, resentfully. “Thomas
swore
to me that your motor is repaired. I saw to it that the heater was working myself.
So why will you not perform
?”
It would all be so much easier if Beth and Eric would permit him to attend to these things by magic—there would be no need for pumps or heaters or other-arcane mysteries of Cold Iron and electricity. The ancient (as these things were reckoned in California) cedar hot tub would be even now bubbling merrily away, heating for the house-warming/Faire Opening party tonight. But no, they had flatly forbidden any such thing, even so simple an act as kenning and reproducing a paltry few fifty-dollar bills to ease their way.
“We have to keep a low profile, Kory,” Beth kept saying. “The Feds are looking for us. There are things we can do, and things we can’t do—passing fifty-dollar bills with the same serial numbers and having appliances that work without being plugged in are a couple of things we can’t do. It wouldn’t surprise me to know that the Feds have caught on to the elven trick of money-kenning. If the Feds found L.A. bills up here, or heard about some strange people who don’t seem to need electricity, they’ll be on us like fleas on a hound.”
“But I do not understand why these Feds should be looking for us—” he had said, puzzled. “There was nothing for them to find in Griffith Park.”
“They don’t have an explanation for what happened to—to Phil,” Beth had replied, her voice breaking a little, as it always did when she spoke of the old animator who had been her friend. “They don’t have one for what happened to my apartment, either—or to Eric’s. They don’t like things they can’t explain. Eric and I are the common links to all three places, and right now they’d like nothing better than to trump up some kind of charge that all three of us were involved in a drug ring or something, just to get the mystery off the books.”
“And you know they were looking for Beth when the fight at the park was over,” Eric had put in, mildly. “I doubt they’ve given up on that. Especially if they have a warrant.”
Kory had shaken his head, unable to understand such blind thinking— but he had been forced to agree to abide by his friends’ rules. It had been hard, though, especially this past winter when it had become so hard to earn money, and Beth and Eric had gone about with long faces, sometimes quarreling out of worry. He had feared for all of them, then, and not from these “Feds.” He had feared that love would turn bitter in their hearts, that they must regret ever seeing him. It had been hard to keep from working magic then, and he had only refrained because he had known they must feel it was necessary, since they had gone to such elaborate lengths to keep their names from appearing in any official records.
Take this house, for instance. Officially, it belonged to Greg Johnson, a friend of Eric’s, and inherited from Greg’s maiden aunt who had lived here most of her seventy-two years. But Greg was something Beth called a “computer wizard,” although Kory had never once seen the glow of magic about him, and he was so wealthy by mortal standards that he already had a dwelling he much favored. This townhouse, although it had been lovely in its day, full of glowing woodwork, with a garden even an elven lady would have been charmed by, had become neglected over the years. Greg had kept it locked and boarded up—until a friend of a friend of a friend had directed Eric to him with their tale of woe, and their acute need for housing they need not furnish references for.
They lived here rent-free—the bargain they had struck being that they would restore the place to its former glory. And there were many, many things that Kory could do there that Beth and Eric had not frowned upon. Though why it should be a bad thing to reproduce a bill of paper money, and a good thing to reproduce a sheet of walnut paneling, he was not certain.
He had only to stroke a piece of the woodwork with his magic, whispering to it, instructing it to recall its beauty—and gouges or insect-holes would vanish, carving reappear, forty years of paint peel away, and the wonderful carved moldings of seventy years ago would shine forth as if newly oiled and newly hewn.
Only. Hmm. Well, Eric understands that it is a strain for me, if Beth does not
. Since he was not a major mage, the cost to him in terms of exhaustion, personal energy and stress was high, especially when working alone. But he was no longer working alone; Eric could use his Bardic magery to tap into deeper sources of energy, and feed them to Kory, and the toll was not as high as it would otherwise have been.
Beth didn’t understand what he was doing; Eric, in whom the magics of Bards ran deeply and strongly, saw it, but could not yet replicate it. That would come, in time, Kory had assured him. Eric had laughed, and retorted that he was in no hurry—what he could do already scared him enough!
It was simple enough, really. Every made thing held within it the memory of what it had been like when it was first created. Learning that was part of kenning, the means by which the elves (or Great Bards) studied a thing to replicate it. Once Kory had kenned something, he could not only reproduce it, he could repair it, by building upon that memory. That was how he had restored Eric’s boots after the Battle of Griffith Park —the boots that Prince Terenil had created for him—
Now it was Kory’s turn to swallow grief, Terenil had been more than liege, he had been that rarest of things among elvenkind, who chose their bonds carefully, for they would bind for centuries. Terenil had been a friend.
Well, none of this was making the hot tub function.
He stared at the dark wooden tub with resentment. He had repaired the wood magically, after Beth had salvaged it from someone else’s discard heap. Thomas Crawford, who repaired appliances when he was not busking at Faires, had fixed the motor in return for a pair of magically-made boots like Eric’s. Kory had traded many pairs of boots and leather pants and bodices for other work done on the house—for Faire folk were an eclectic lot, and many of them, like Thomas, worked at the kind of odd jobs that would have been the lot of a tinker in the old days. And all of them coveted Eric’s boots and leather trousers, Kory himself had seen to the heater, since it was of ceramic and glass, copper and aluminum, and not made of deadly Cold Iron. So
why
would it not work?
He was more than half tempted to turn his magic loose on it anyway, and Beth’s tender sensibilities be hanged. But he knew what she would say if she saw it. She’d already given him the lecture once.
“
People are curious at housewarming parties. They prowl, they poke, they look into things and ooh and ahh. And f they see something that’s working without being plugged in—they’re going to talk. And when they talk, the Feds will hear about it.
”
Well, perhaps if he made it look as if it were operating in a normal fashion… leaving it plugged in and not functioning correctly was dangerous. But if he plugged it into a socket that wasn’t working and
then
magicked everything, no one would know the difference. Not even Beth.
He found the end of the cord, and picked it up, intending to pull it loose and plug it into one of the outdoor sockets he and Thomas had determined was dead and not worth the reviving—
And it came up loose in his hand, the plug plainly lying in the middle of the path.
He flushed with embarrassment, glad beyond words that there was no one here to have witnessed his humiliation. The episode with the microwave popcorn had been bad enough; the encounter with the vacuum cleaner that he had mistaken for an Unseleighe monster was worse. He would never have been able to live
this
down.
Still blushing, he took the cord to a socket he knew very well was live, and plugged it in—and was rewarded immediately by the Feel of electric power flowing through the cord under his hand, and the hum of heater and pump beyond the screening evergreen bushes. When he returned to the tub, the eddies in the water told him that all was well, and the water would be ready for soaking when they returned from the Fairesite. He stood up, then, and basked in a little glow of self-congratulation. He was no Great Bard, but he had, by Danaan, done his share to make the house —and especially the gardens— into wonderful places. He had not restored the gardens to their former manicured state. He had, instead, created a miniature version of the kind of wilderness-garden often found Underhill; a place full of hidden bowers, little moss-lined nooks, home to flowers and birds in all seasons, and green in all seasons too. One could travel from the house to the hot tub without ever once coming under the neighbors’ curious eyes—which, given that Beth had insisted that this be a “clothing optional” tub, was no small feat.
Kory himself was looking forward to his first soak in this marvelous piece of human ingenuity. Beth had introduced him to the wonders of hot tubs at an odd meditation-place just south of here, in the city called “Santa Cruz,” and he had been an instant convert. Wonderful stuff, hot water… that marvelous invention, the shower, for instance—
A shriek from the windows above made him jump, as startled as the starling had been earlier. The shriek was feminine, and followed by a curse as paint-blistering as his own had been.
“
Korendil!
”
He looked up, guiltily; Beth leaned out of the bathroom window, head covered in soapsuds. “How many times do I have to tell you?” she not quite-shouted, “
The hot water runs out!
”