Castle for Rent

Twenty-two Temple

“Try it again,” Gene said.

Linda put out her hands and closed her eyes. A china plate with a hamburger on it materialized on the stone floor of the temple.

Gene picked the hamburger up and bit into it, tasting it clinically. “Better than the last one,” he pronounced. “Edible, but still not what you’d call gourmet.”

“It’s getting a little easier,” Linda said. “But I doubt if I’ll ever be as good as I was in the castle.”

“Well, that goes without saying. The castle is a huge power source.”

Sheila said, “Let me see if I understand this. You’re saying that this world is one in which magic works. Right?”

“Right,” Gene said.

“But it’s not the same kind of magic that’s in the castle?”

“Right again. Different universe, different laws.”

“But you say you’re slowly getting used to this different kind of magic.”

Linda answered, “Sort of. But, again, it’s not going to be the same as back in the castle. Everything is real easy there. Maybe too easy. We got spoiled.”

“At least we won’t starve,” Gene said, holding up the half-eaten hamburger. Then he looked over at Snowclaw, who was sleeping on the narrow stone bench near the wall. “But that doesn’t solve all our problems.”

“It doesn’t solve any of them,” Linda said. “We can’t stay here.”

“Right,” Gene said. “So, I say we try it.”

“I’m not up to it yet,” Linda said. “If I can’t conjure a hamburger right, how the heck could I do a portal?”

“Well, let’s look at it this way. There are an infinite number of possible hamburgers. Now, an haute cuisine, gourmet, taste-treat kind of hamburger is going to be pretty hard to find out of all those others. But there’s only one portal to the castle from this world. One. It shouldn’t be hard for you to find it and fetch it here. You follow?”

Linda giggled. “Gene, you always have a strange way of looking at things. I don’t think I find things and fetch them. I just whip ’em up and they appear.”

“No, I think you do find things. How else can you explain your ability to conjure things you’ve never seen before? Like the first time you whipped up food for Snowy, food that you’d never imagined, let alone set eyes on. What I think you do is this. You send out feelers or sensors into interuniversal space and locate stuff. Then, somehow, you pull the stuff in.”

Linda looked dubious. “How do I know where to find what I want?”

“I don’t know. I’m not saying this is the actual way it happens. It’s just one way to think about it. Skeptical-rationalist that I am, I can’t bring myself to believe that you create something out of nothing. It must come from somewhere. There must be a law of conservation of … whatever. Mass, energy, you name it, even in magical universes. What you do is merely find stuff and transport it. It takes energy, and the castle supplies that. But the amount of energy you’d need to create something even as small as a quarter-pound hamburger would be stupendous! E equals mc squared — you know?”

“Yeah, I think I get you. But what’s going to supply the power here?”

“This temple, maybe. You said you could feel it. It’s a different kind of power. Think of it this way: the castle’s AC, but this world is DC. Actually it’s probably better to say that they’re both AC, but not in phase — but forget that, forget that. Do you get the drift?”

“Gotcha,” Linda said.

“I understand it,” Sheila said. “I think you ought to go ahead and try, Linda.”

“I’m game,” Linda said.

Gene got up and searched the stone floor. “I saw some markings over here. Yeah, here’s one of them. See this circle?”

“There’s another over there,” Linda said.

“Yeah, there are four of them, positioned around the altar. From what I can glean from the murals, four priests stood in those circles when they conjured the portal.”

“If that’s what they did.”

Gene threw out his arms. “Hey, look. What do we have to lose?”

“Famous last words.”

“It’ll work, it’s gotta. What I’m proposing is this. There are four of us. We each stand in one of these circles, and we all do our best to conjure together. It might work if we try to reproduce as many aspects of the conjuring ceremony as we can.”

“Can’t hurt.”

“Wait a minute,” Sheila said. “I hope you don’t expect any magic from me. I know I don’t have any.”

“You never can tell,” Gene said. “It usually sneaks up on you.”

“Well, okay. It can’t hurt.”

“Yeah. You know, it is starting to sound like famous last words. But we gotta try it. Okay, everybody. Sheila, wake up Snowy, will you?”

Sheila did, and Snowy woke up with a start. Snarling, he lashed out with one arm. Sheila ducked, narrowly missing having her head taken off.

“Whew! Is he better after he’s had his coffee?”

“Sorry, Sheila,” Gene said. “He’s suffering pretty bad in this heat.”

“Oh, it’s all right. He didn’t mean it. Did you, Snowy?”

Snowclaw rubbed his eyes. He growled again, then groaned and got up.

“How are you feeling, big fella?” Gene asked.

Snowy made a gesture that said, “So-so.”

As best he could, Gene tried to explain what they were about to do. Snowclaw seemed to understand.

They all took their positions. Silence fell in the temple. Outside, distant hooting calls echoed in the jungle, punctuating a wider, greater silence. Dripping water plop-plopped somewhere off in a dark corner of the ruined building.

Sheila felt a warm rivulet of sweat trickle down her back, but she didn’t dare scratch. Everyone looked deadly serious, and she didn’t want to break the mood. She remained skeptical about the whole enterprise, but did her best to concentrate, calling up images of the portals she had seen. There hadn’t been very many, and there wasn’t very much to visualize except for a hole in the air, which was a difficult concept to grasp, much less visualize. She tried thinking of the castle and how much she wished she were back there. Not because she liked the place, but because the castle seemed one step closer to the world she had lost.

But was that the way she really felt? Part of her wanted to go back home, but another part was curious about the castle itself. She had found new friends there, people who shared some of the same personal problems. Everyone had been friendly so far, for the most part. But that wasn’t the entire explanation for her attraction to the place. Where else in the world — in the universe? (or universes?) — would one be likely to meet a wide variety of beings, intelligent beings,who were not human? She felt privileged, somehow, to have met Snowclaw. She hadn’t seen many other nonhumans besides the Bluefaces, but she’d heard enough to have been struck by the wonder of it all.

Wonder. Yes, that was it. The place was wonderful, in the sense of being full of wondrous sights and things. It wasn’t always wonderful in the colloquial sense — sometimes it was absolutely frightening and very unpleasant. But it was so totally different from her former existence. Life back home was boring, dreary, and full of small frustrations. And it wasn’t entirely safe, either, what with wars, disasters, terrorism, crime, etc., etc., check any daily newspaper. So, what did her old life have to offer that her new life didn’t? The food was better here, she had to admit that. Not here, in the temple, in whatever world this was, but in the castle, where she wanted to be now. She had to get back there, so that Gene and Snowy could beat the crap out of those blue guys and take the castle back — so Sheila could get something good to eat again! Yeah, she wanted to be back in the dining room with all that terrific food. Those blue guys sure were jerks! Spoiling everything —

“Forget it, Sheila,” she heard Gene say.

“Huh?” She opened her eyes and looked around. Gene, Linda, and Snowy had left their stations and were walking toward her.

“Forget it,” Gene said. “We’ll try again. Maybe Linda needs to practice more.”

Linda said, “Gene, look.”

“What?”

They all beheld what had appeared at the center of the circular altar. Standing there was the upright oblong of the portal, dark castle stone visible on the other side.

“Let’s go!” Gene yelled.

They ran through the portal in single file, Gene with sword drawn leading the way.

“Great White Stuff!” Snowy shouted as he came through. “I thought I was going to die in that heat!”

“You okay now?” Gene asked.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine now. I’m never going to complain about this place again.”

Linda was staring at Sheila. “You did it,” she said.

“Me?” Sheila said. “How is that possible?”

“I don’t know. I tried, and it didn’t work. I couldn’t summon the portal. You kept trying, and you did it.”

“But —”

“Linda’s right,” Gene said. “It must have been your magic. How you got it in the temple is anybody’s guess. But I’m guessing you had it here all the time and just didn’t realize it.”

Sheila lifted her shoulders. “Whatever you guys say. All I did is wish to be back here.”

“Well, this is the only place I know of where wishes are horses and beggars go riding all over the goddamn place. You wished, and you got. Which brings up an interesting question.”

Linda said, “Yeah! Maybe Sheila’s talent is whipping up portals!”

Sheila said, “Huh?”

“Possibility,” Gene said thoughtfully. He pointed to a blank wall. “Try to materialize a portal, say, right here.”

“What portal?”

“Uh, well, let’s go for the big money. The portal that leads back home.”

Sheila’s eyes widened. “Do you think that’s possible?”

“Why not? Try it. Or any portal. Give it a go.”

Sheila tried, but she just didn’t know how to go about it.

“Something’s wrong,” she said. “Back in the temple it was different. Like you said, different universe, different laws. I can feel the magic here, though. Before, I don’t think I did. Or at least I didn’t know I was feeling it.”

Gene looked annoyed. “This is getting complicated. You can do it back there but not here. Linda’s the other way around. Now you have to get used to the castle’s laws. Hell, why isn’t anything ever simple?” He squared himself into a heroic stance. “Well, hell. Us John Wayne types ain’t much for subtleties.”

“What happened to Cyrano?” Linda wanted to know.

“That big-nosed pansy, fighting with those skinny swords? Hmph!”

“Gene, I think you’re the one who’s suffering from the heat.”

“Hey, I’m hungry. How ‘bout rustling up some grub, woman?”

“Right away, pardner.”

“Yeah,Samantha. Wiggle your nose, cutesylike, and bewitch us something to eat.”

“Okay,Darin.”

Snowclaw leaned toward Sheila and asked quietly, “Do all humans act silly like this a lot of the time?”

Sheila laughed. “Yeah.”

It was Linda who saw the bodies first. The group had been walking down the corridor, and she was first to turn the corner. She stopped dead and put her hand over her mouth. Gene drew his sword, came round the corner, and halted. Frowning, he slowly put his sword back in its scabbard.

Sheila peeked around the corner. The hallway ahead was littered with dead Bluefaces, dozens of them, most in a profound state of dismemberment. The sight didn’t sicken her as much as it would have only the day before.

Gene examined a few of the corpses, then turned to his companions.

“Someone else is in the castle,” he said.