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  "This is getting ridiculous." Thus spake the Elder, a bit coolly. "You lose one carrier, another is delivered to you at great effort, and now you summon me from my most important assignment to tell me that some strange man has stolen the new carrier and most of its equipment away from you? Younger One, did I not know you so well, was I not aware just how thorough was your training . . . Tell me this rare, fantastical tale again."

  The Younger sighed. "Very well, Elder One. I was laboring in the scriptorium at Yorkminster when the alarm device on my carrier warned me of tampering with it."

  "And you are certain you had it stored in the shrouded mode?" demanded the Elder One. "It was completely invisible to the unaided eye?"

  "Oh, yes, Elder One, most assuredly," said the other. "I was of the thought as I excused myself with a tale of a flux of my bowels that some someone had stumbled against the unseeable carrier, there in that dark chamber. Would that my supposition had been so."

  The Elder One nodded in grim agreement. "Would that it had. Go on."

  "The door still was locked when I got there, Elder One. I unpinned the bar, lowered it, and opened the door." The Younger One gulped. "He was standing there beside my carrier. Another carrier, one of the older model, was between me and him. When I saw the second carrier, I thought for a moment that he might be a Specialist on a surprise visit, and I spoke to him in our tongue, but he just grinned at me and said something in a strange tongue—not English, not Scots, not French, not German or any language I was taught or have heard."

  "I was stunned and just stood there, I must say in truth. Then he took from out the older-model carrier a projector. I think it was a Class Four or a Class Five projector, but I can't be certain, for it was not made by our industry. He set it, dropped it inside my carrier, and it vanished. Then he climbed inside his own carrier, and it too was gone."

  "And you say that he did not resemble us?" probed the Elder One.

  "No." The Younger One shook his head. "He was, by English measurements, some five feet and ten inches in height, slender and wiry. His hair and eyes were dark, with the hair hanging in braids on his chest. A band that looked to be of the skin of a serpent was bound about his head. Around his upper arms were metal ornaments—on his left, a copper serpent, on his right, a similar one, but of yellow gold with emerald eyes."

  "He wore no shirt, only a sleeveless short doublet of hide that looked to be from a deer or an elk with the hair still on. He wore odd, tight-legged trousers of a faded-blue color and odd-shaped boots of black leather that came up only to a bit above his ankles and were secured with rawhide thongs put through double rows of metal grommets that ran right up the fronts of the boots."

  "And how was he armed, Younger One?" demanded the elder.

  The dispirited answer came, "He was not, Elder One, not that I could see. And the only weapon that I then bore was my short-bladed quill knife, which I hurled at him as he climbed into his carrier, but the protective field stopped it, of course."

  The Elder One squatted in silence for long minutes, staring out onto the moors and squeezing his chin. The Younger One squatted in a respectful, slightly fearful silence, himself. The horse stamped and whuffed once, then went back to browsing the plants. On high, the moon continued to play its hide-and-seek game among the clouds. At length, the Elder One announced his decision.

  "Ride back to York, Younger One, and go back to being who you are supposed to be. I will go to Our Place in the east tonight, detail the events, and ask that a Specialist be sent here. He will, upon his arrival, make himself known to you, of course. You both will be entirely dependent upon his carrier and equipment until yet another can be fashioned for you."

  "This business about a projector capable of sending a carrier, yet not crafted by us, is most disturbing to me . . . and you may be sure that it will be no less so to others of our kind."

  "Did this man get all of your equipment, then? You are completely unarmed?"

  The Younger One nodded and sighed, then produced the hilt of an edge weapon, saying, "Only contemporary weapons do I now have, Elder One. A dirk, a dagger, and a large wheel-lock handgun, that holstered at my saddle pommel."

  The Elder pressed three fingers in a complicated pattern on the surface of his forearm, and in an eye-blink his carrier was hovering at his side. Arising, he lifted the lid and reached inside it. What he drew out looked exactly like a wheel-lock dag. Flipping it in his hand, he proffered it to the Younger, saying, "Take mine, then. I can get another quickly enough in the east."

  "And now I must leave."

  The Elder One climbed into the carrier. The lid closed and then the carrier rose high, high up into the air before disappearing as if it never had been. Gathering up his bridle, the Younger One trudged back to his nobbled mount.

  Of all his party, Sir Rupen Ademian was the only man for whom the gate was gapped, and then only after he had left all his weapons with one of his squires. The abbess herself met with him in her bare, Spartan office, broke the seals with the strong nails of her sinewy hands, and, bearing the missive to a beam of sunlight, read the archbishop's letter, pointedly scrutinizing signature and seals before coming back to Rupen.

  Having expected, from the descriptions of the abbess he had had from various of the others of Harold of York's staff, some withered crone, Rupen was pleasantly surprised to be confronted by an active woman, healthy and looking to be in her prime of strength and wit. True, he could actually see nothing of her save face and hands, all else being effectively shrouded in a voluminous habit of unbleached wool and a wimple of starched linen.

  "Sir knight," she said in a rich voice, using what he could recognize as the distinctive patois of the higher nobility, "you were quickly recognized and identified to me as the knight of His Grace of York's household who had helped our four sisters subdue Her unfortunate Grace of Norfolk. But knowing men as well as I do has bred into me a constant suspicion of them and their motives. It were better His Grace of York had sent some cleric than a lay gentleman upon such mission. May I know that of which you wish to speak with Her Grace the Lady Kristell?"

  Rupen nodded. "His Grace of York wishes some information in regard to a deceased friend of His Grace of Norfolk."

  She regarded him carefully as he spoke, then just sat for a bit, still staring at his face and eyes, her lips compressed. Finally, she said, "Very well, sir knight, it will require time to properly prepare Her Grace of Norfolk for a reception. Return outside to your entourage and await a summons, for I dislike having any man other than a cleric within my walls for any reason or for any longer time than his task necessitates."

  "When Her Grace is ready, a sister will come to the gate. She will accompany you and she and another sister will bide with you and Her Grace for so long as you must remain. Please be brief, sir knight."

  Rupen immediately recognized the short, beefy woman who came to the barred gate and called for him as one of the quartet of nuns who had joined with him in the destructive donnybrook which the subduing and binding of Bass Foster's raving wife had been. When he spoke to her by name, she briefly flitted the first smile he had seen in the complex of the nursing order.

  The chamber to which he was conducted was bare save for a long table that spanned almost all of its width. The tabletop was a good two or three inches thick and of a dark, dense-grained wood, and the legs were thicker than his thighs; he estimated that it would be a job for four full-grown men to shift it far. There was a stool on each side of the table, and down its center a grille of hardwood dowels had been erected. When he was seated on the nearer of the stools, another door opened and another sister led in and saw seated a manacled figure in a habit, but without a wimple.

  The second sister remained, taking a stand at one end of the table where she might watch both Sir Rupen and her charge. She who had conducted Rupen took an identical stance at the opposite end.

  He had met or seen Bass Foster's wife but seldom prior to this, but even so, he noted startling changes in her. T
he most striking change, of course, was the bald fact that most of her black hair had been shorn raggedly off and, for all that her face and hands looked to have been freshly and vigorously scrubbed, there was a distinct odor of long-unwashed female flesh lingering about her.

  It was patent that she did not at first recognize Rupen, clad as he was in jackboots, buff-coat, plumed brimmer-hat, and doeskin gloves. In the Northumbrian dialect, she asked dully, "Well, what is now to be taken from me or done to me? Have that precious pair—my loving husband and the holy Archbishop—decided that they want my life? I think I'll welcome my murder as opposed to living such life as this."

  But Rupen spoke in twentieth-century American English. "Mrs. Foster, you obviously don't recall me. Inside this garish getup is Rupen Ademian, from Richmond, Virginia. How are you today, ma'am?"

  With a clanking of her wrist fetters, the woman leaned forward and spoke rapidly, intensely. "Have you come to get me out of here, Mr. Ademian? Please, please say you have! I'm not insane yet, but I sure as hell will be if I have to stay here much longer, and if I don't die of pneumonia or disease first. Well, have you?"

  Rupen had discussed just this matter with Harold of York when that prelate had handed him the letter to give to the abbess. The Archbishop had been firm. "Rupen, of all people in Yorkminster, you should know just how disturbed and how downright dangerous Krystal Foster is become. I recall reading in one of the books of Bass Foster's library the opinion that in mid-twentieth-century America, it was significant that so many people with hidden emotional quirks sought employment as professionals in the field of mental health. And Krystal Foster nee Kent was doing a residency in psychiatry at the time she was projected here, I understand. No, I think that Krystal, little Joe Foster, and everyone else are much better off with her remaining where and as she presently is."

  Nonetheless, intent on achieving his own ends, Rupen lied glibly, "Quite possibly, Mrs. Foster, though not immediately, of course. You understand that such things take time—there is as formidable a hedge of bureaucracy in this world and time as ever there was in our own, and that of Yorkminster progresses with as glacial a degree of slowness as any other."

  The gaunt-faced woman slumped back. "Then what are you come here for, Mr. Ademian?"

  "Mrs. Foster, just how much do you know of your husband's life before he was projected here?" Rupen plunged directly into it.

  She shrugged her shoulders. "Only what he told me. He was a writer of fiction, mostly. He lived alone, except for some cats, in a tri-level near the river. Although he owned that house, a small boat, and a jeep pickup, he was not in any way wealthy, though some of his family were."

  "I'm told he was an army officer, at one time," said Rupen.

  "Yes." She nodded. "I've seen the commission, it's packed away up at Whyffler Hall, I believe. He enlisted straight out of prep school, was sent to Korea as a private, and won a battlefield promotion to lieutenant. But he didn't stay in the army, although he did continue in the reserves, I think he said, mostly because his pay supplemented his GI benefits in college."

  "Was he ever previously married, there in our world, Mrs. Foster?" inquired the knight.

  "Yeess . . . ?" She wrinkled up her brows for a moment, then said, "He had two wives, over the years. One was a teacher, I think, and if he ever told me what the other one did, I don't recall. All I can remember now is that he caught her in adultery, yet when she filed for divorce, she took half of everything he then owned, despite the fact that no children were involved. The experience embittered him, needless to say, and that was when he decided to leave the city and get away from people almost entirely."

  "He had found a new-built tri-level on the Potomac River in a rural area and was trying to obtain a mortgage loan when the will of some relative or other was read and he found himself in the unexpected possession of enough cash to buy the place outright, with enough left over to allow him to live modestly until he sold his first book."

  "Mrs. Foster," asked Rupen, "do you know of something called the F.F.V.? Did your husband ever mention it, perhaps?"

  A brief smile twisted her chapped lips. "Yes, he often joked, sometimes rather obscenely, about his heritage. He said that the vaunted, deified ancestors of the First Families of Virginia had been only a pack of Newgate jailbirds who had been sent to the then colony of Virginia in lieu of the gallows. He said that their subsequent activities in the New World made the robber barons of the nineteenth century look like angels of mercy and compassion by comparison. He also said that at the university, the accepted meaning of F.F.V. was Fist-Fucking Virgins or Frigging Faggot Vermin, which he said referred to the fact that many freshman scions of these families were often inverted—shy and/or inclined toward homosexuality. He said that the women of that ilk were just as screwy as the men, in their own ways. He said that he had never met but two such women who were worth a damn—his mother and a girl called Carolyn."

  Rupen gulped hard. "This Carolyn, she was a sibling, perhaps. Or one of his wives?"

  "No." Krystal Foster shook her head. "She was a woman with whom Bass had a love affair. Some of her things that still were in his house when it was projected here are still packed away up north, up at Whyffler Hall . . . where I wish to hell I was. Oh, God!" Her voice caught, half-choked on a repressed sob of misery. "I wish so much that I were back home, at Whyffler Hall."

  Seeing the tears glittering in her eyes, Rupen found a sudden lump in his throat and felt, just then, a bit of a bounder for having misled her in the belief that his visit had something to do with freeing her from her imprisonment in the abbey of the nursing order. Unbidden, seemingly of their own violation, he found himself speaking words to her.

  "Mrs. Foster, I promise that I will do all within my power to see you back in Whyffler Hall."

  And deep within himself, Sir Rupen Ademian knew that he meant every word of that promise.

  "Rupen, it is absolutely out of the question. I should never have given you leave to even visit her. Her madness has evidently affected you, on even so short an exposure. No, the woman must bide where she is, in the abbey, where the sisters can care for her properly, where she cannot harm others or cause her retainers to wreak harm, such as she did upon poor Mistress Jenny Bostwick, and would've done to that little boy, had the Irish knight not flatly refused to murder a child on her mad command."

  Harold Kenmore, once a research scientist at a government-owned facility in twenty-first-century America, now Archbishop of York in this world into which he and a companion had projected themselves almost two hundred years before, slumped back into his padded and canopied cathedra chair and took a long draught of spicy mulled canary wine, for the night was chill for summer, and after so long even a man who had been treated with the longevity serum still aged somewhat and felt the effects of that process on cold nights.

  Fearing death fully as much as any other mortal man born of woman, he had given himself an injection of the serum brought to this world in the recent past by the vicious woman, Colonel Dr. Jane Stone, who had had herself projected here in search of him and Dr. Emmett O'Malley, apparently unknowing that they two had come to this world more than a century and a half before her arrival and that Emmett by then was dead, killed in battle as a crusader against England.

  The serum had had some effect, he knew, for he now had much more energy than he had had in years, and more than one person had made remarks about his sudden more youthful appearance. But still, this night, his ancient bones ached with the cold.

  Rupen drew an iron loggerhead from out of the hearth fire, blew off the ash, then plunged the glowing metal into a silver mug of the spiced canary, creating a hiss and a cloud of pungent steam.

  Harold accepted it gratefully, wrapping his cold hands close around it while he sipped. "Rupen, you are become a master at the blending of spiced wine; the only artist of whom I can just now think who might surpass you is that little slave girl that Bass Foster sent over here for me to protect, Ita, she who proved so miracul
ously to be the long-lost granddaughter of the Lord of the Isles. I pray she be well and safe and happy this night, after having so suffered for so much of her young life."

  Rupen chuckled. "Considering the wealth and very real power of her grandfather and how much he obviously cares for this child returned from the dead to him, I doubt not but that he will move heaven and earth to see to her happiness, Hal. I think that Ita will quickly become truly Lady Eibhlin Mac Iain Mac Dhomhnuill; we need not worry about her."

  "But, Hal, I cannot but worry about Krystal Foster. No, no, please, let me finish. Hal, you're a born survivor, so am I, so too are Bass Foster, Pete Fairley, Carey Carr, Buddy Webster, and Dave Atkins; we're all of us adaptable and able to apply knowledge we gained in the other world to this one, to fit ourselves into what is actually a far more primitive and brutal and less comfortable environment than that into which we were born and in which we lived for so long."

  "Hal, Krystal is none of these things, neither emotionally, mentally, nor physically; that's part of why she freaked out, I think. Think on this: She is a medical doctor, in addition to her psychiatric training; she performed and performed successfully some bits of battlefield surgery in her earlier years here—one of those saved the life of him who today is the Holy Roman Emperor, in fact. So why has she never seen fit to apply that incredibly valuable medical and surgical knowledge and skill she possesses to the ill-served and suffering and dying people of this world?"

  The old man shook his head. "Bass tried to persuade her, once, to teach modern techniques to a bevy of midwives, up in the Marches. But it didn't work out, I hear—she told him that she simply could not get through to them, could not penetrate their superstition-ridden minds, and so she just gave up on them."

  Rupen shook his head. "Hal, that's an excuse, not a reason. The reason is that Krystal's mind is just not sufficiently flexible to allow her to adapt enough to mediaeval ways to get her points, her knowledge, across to common, mediaeval women. And that's only the tip of the iceberg, too."