Web of Defeat Read online

  QUEST FOR THE WHITE DUCK 02

  WEB OF DEFEAT

  Lionel Fenn

  CHAPTER ONE

  The red-and-gold conical tent in the middle of the rolling fields that lay just to the west of the city of Rayn, in the land of Chey, a few adventure-filled weeks from a pantry in New Jersey, collapsed.

  There was a moment of anticipatory silence during which the very air over the forests, the farms, the houses, the animals, the birds, and the steep slopes of the northern mountains themselves seemed not to move; there was a moment more when it appeared as if the inhabitants of the tent would remain blissfully unaware of the destruction of their temporary home, and continue their innocent if not exactly pristine sleep; and there was a last and almost quivering moment when it seemed as if the serenity of the night would remain unmarred by an unseemly explosion of fear, anger, or a chaotic mixture of both.

  Nothing breathed; nothing stirred.

  No one in the city of Rayn felt their dreams disturbed.

  Then Gideon Sunday, thoroughly embroiled in the tent's folds and virtually unable to move a muscle, said, "Well, shit."

  A second voice, somewhat more rasping but definitely female, told him to shut up, stop complaining, and get them free before they suffocated.

  Gideon, muttering imprecations his companion had previously heard only in films of a supposedly adult nature, battled his way through the hide-and-fur convolutions that had settled around him, and poked his head into the air. He took a deep breath, reached back, and gently dragged his companion out, paying no heed to her threats of decapitation if he so much as dented one of her precious limbs. He was not afraid. The worst she could do in her present condition, he figured, was nibble him to death.

  And once unencumbered by the debris of their domicile, they sat glumly on the cool ground and watched the lights of Rayn snap out one by one; then, with silent sighs, they looked up at the constellations neither of them knew, and listened to the nightbirds whose songs they had only recently come to find familiar.

  Gideon shook his head slowly. He had been in the middle of a disturbing and definitely nonerotic dream, one filled with portents he'd just as soon forget because they meant that the dream might soon have become a nightmare.

  He also wondered if the faint trembling of the ground he had experienced as part of that selfsame dream just prior to his waking had anything to do with the tent falling down about his ears. Naturally, he thought, if it was part of the dream, he had actually felt nothing, and the collapse could be attributed to natural causes and his inability to figure out how the hell the damned support poles worked.

  If, however, that same faint trembling had not been a part of the dream, then either this portion of Chey had been subject to a minor earthquake of no notable consequence, or to a minor earthquake of consequence indeed since it was not caused by any generally understood forces that attend to such subterranean matters.

  If it was the latter, he wasn't sure he wanted to know what was going on.

  And the more he thought about it, the more he was positive that he didn't want to know.

  Before he could speak of it, however, a breeze took his longish brown hair and slapped it across his face. He brushed it away angrily, drew a rough-woven green cloak about his shoulders, and suggested to the faceless full moon that his mother had not raised him to live in the open like a fanatical Boy Scout with a penchant for loving nature in a manner he considered damned close to perversion.

  "Mother didn't raise you to be a football player, either," his companion said wearily as she settled down beside him and snapped a blade of dew-laden grass into her mouth. "But you were one. Sort of."

  "Please, Sis," he said, "don't remind me, okay?"

  "I just want you to take into consideration the alternatives to what we have now."

  "What we have now is a tent that won't work. This is the fourth time this week it's fallen apart."

  "True. But what you could have had is a place in a soup kitchen, or in a home for homeless quarterbacks, or, god forbid, a job as a TV weatherman, and don't you forget it." She jabbed him sharply. "Look, Giddy, the team disbanded, you weren't picked up by anyone else, and you were spending all your unemployed time feeling sorry for yourself in that stupid house. So how is this any worse?"

  "That house did not fall down on my head."

  "That house gave you the chance to get out of there, make something of yourself, and"—her voice softened—"and find me again."

  There was no arguing with any of it.

  Actually, he thought, there were a few dozen pretty good arguments that came instantly to mind, but he stifled them quickly and merely nodded instead. All in all, his sister was not far from wrong. He had definitely been out of work, had thought her dead, and had been toying with the idea of selling shoes for a living, when he discovered to his rather immense surprise a woman, a monster, and an entire new world—not necessarily in that order—in (or rather, at the back of) his pantry.

  The woman, the imperious though perversely alluring Glorian of the violet eyes and shimmering white gown, shamelessly recruited him to find her missing duck. Her missing white duck. The same missing white duck that, if not located in time, would become the most important part of a diabolical ceremony that could cause the normally placid and eerily silent Blood River to overflow its banks and devastate within weeks a land that had, until that time, lived in relative harmony with its environment and all the evil that came with it.

  After a great deal of soul-searching, and a few attempts on his life by assorted creatures that had no business being on any world anywhere in the universe, much less in the one he occupied at the moment, he had found the duck, saved the people, and discovered to his continuing wonderment that he didn't really want to go home. Here, he was needed; there, he was just another footnote in the pages of sports history. Here, despite the odds and the often deadly opposition, he had been reasonably successful; there, he was the only member of a defunct team not to find a job elsewhere—though, he admitted sourly, there really wasn't much vertical or horizontal promotion available for a third-string quarterback whose only strength was being able to throw three times as far as anyone else, and not with the greatest accuracy either.

  This world, then, was the place he lived in now—a world much like his own, save for not having the large cities, the traffic, the roads, the trees, the fields, the oceans, the rivers, the lakes, the people, and the electronic wonders he sometimes missed but didn't pine for the way his sister pined for a good thick steak with every trimming she could think of.

  This particular area was known as Chey. Maybe. He wasn't really clear on names around here since, until a few weeks ago, he had been too busy running around, trying not to get himself killed.

  The monster—the black beast—he'd just as soon not think about.

  He did, however, think about the dream.

  "Sis," he said, "you didn't by chance feel a slight earth tremor, did you? Just before the tent fell?"

  She shook her head.

  "Then it must have been a dream."

  "You've been having a lot of those lately."

  "I've had a lot on my mind lately."

  "Well, if you must know," she said peevishly, "so have I."

  He looked at her with a mixture of concern and suspicion. His sister, when she was troubled or thinking, seldom understood the effect she had on him; but since there was no place to run, he asked if she was hungry.

  She shook her head and said, "No, Gideon, I have a problem."

  He shifted uncomfortably. The last problem she had had was disappearing off a bridge in a vicious California rainstorm at the nebulous height of her film career. In the glitter and glamour of Hollywood she was known as Monica Freeman, an actress of moderate
ly surpassed talent and a fierce pride in her work and her principles; at home, and in her frequent letters to him, she was simply plain old Tuesday. Their reunion had been a traumatic and tearful one, even in the midst of a daring rescue.

  It had been tearful because he had missed her terribly and believed she had been killed in the car accident. It was traumatic because the man he had rescued her from, the nasty and vain strawberry blond Lu Wamchu, warlord of Choy and possessor of three equally nasty and vain wives, had turned her into a rather large white duck.

  The same white duck for which or whom he had laid his life on the line so many times in order to save this world.

  "So," he said, smiling at the goose-sized bird nestled beside him, "what's the trouble?"

  "It's Finlay."

  "Finlay?"

  Tuesday gave him a one-eyed glare at the suspicious tone in his voice. "Yes, Finlay."

  He kept his smile intact, though the thought of Finlay Botham, blacksmith to the practically horseless countryside, made him wish that the nonexistent earthquake would make a timely reappearance. "What about him?"

  Her feathers fluffed, her beak trembled. "I... I love him."

  "Oh."

  "I want to marry him."

  "Oh, dear."

  "I want to—"

  "Yeah, right," he said quickly. "I get it."

  "So? Do something!"

  He turned to stare straight into her eye. "Like what? I'm not a magician, you know. I can't just wave my arms around and turn you back into a woman. I can't concoct potions or pills or whatever the hell magicians use. Jesus, Sis, I don't even have a damned job here anymore! So what do you want me to do?"

  A large fowl-tear glinted in her right eye.

  "Now, damnit, Tuesday!"

  "You promised," she said in cruel reminder. "You promised you'd get me back to normal."

  He reached out a hand to stroke her, but she huffed and waddled off into the dark, her tail sagging, her flat feet thumping the ground sorrowfully. The temptation to follow was replaced by caution; Tuesday, when she was horny, was a pain in the ass; and when she was right, she was worse.

  He had, no question about it, promised.

  After Wamchu's plans for conquering the Middle Ground before moving on to the Upper Ground and conquering that too in the spirit of the true dictatorial democracy had been thwarted, and Wamchu had been banished to his dark domain in Choy, the Lower Ground, with his three unpleasant wives, Gideon had told her he would do anything to restore her true form. The problem was, as he'd said, that he was no magician.

  And the one for-want-of-a-better-word magician they did know was not much help since, as time passed and he lost the taste for magic, his spells tended to fade, alter, and otherwise become useless for anything but memories. The man had, in fact, tried three times to restore Tuesday to her rightful figure, and all he had received for it was a headache and a couple of chunks nipped out of his shins.

  Still, there was always the chance that Whale, for such was his name, might have come up with something new.

  "Tuesday!" he called.

  And received no answer.

  "Hey, Tuesday!"

  The field's silence was that of the ever-shortening night.

  "Hey, listen," he said, pushing himself to his feet, "what do you say we drop in on Whale in the morning? He might be able to give us a lead even if he can't do anything himself."

  There was the sound of flapping wings overhead.

  He looked up, grinning when he saw a dark shape blotting out the stars, swooping its way toward him in a lazy, graceful glide. There was no doubt about it—she was much lighter on her feet now than she had been when she was human.

  Then the shape resolved itself into something no duck ever dreamed of being, save perhaps during hunting season, and he dove for the tent just as it screeched and snapped out glowing talons to take off his head.

  He rolled to avoid the scalping, rolled again when it missed and swooped around for another dive. Without a weapon, he knew he was helpless, but though he dug furiously through the tent's folds to find something to strike back with, he came up empty-handed just as the creature dove a third time. He rolled expertly out of its way, arms up to protect himself, and found his hands closing around feathers that seemed made of black ice. He yelped at the burning that struck through to his wrists, and rolled again, onto the grass, then bounced to his feet and stood there, looking up, and waiting.

  There was no sound but that of his own breathing.

  He could see nothing above but the stars and the seemingly craterless moon.

  He waited. He listened. He knew he should have listened to his mother and taken a rich wife.

  He also knew, now, that the earthquake was no dream.

  And when a beak tapped his shoulder, he managed to transform his scream into a squeak that almost tore out his throat.

  "You called?" Tuesday said.

  "Sis," he said, "we have a problem."

  CHAPTER TWO

  The city of Rayn in the land of Chey kept a modestly low profile in the rolling plain on which it was situated. Its gateless wall was a fainthearted ten feet high where it wasn't collapsing from benign neglect. Within its rocky boundary wide, cobbled streets ran in semiperfect concentric circles about yellow-stone, flat-roofed buildings no more than a single story tall. From a distance, it appeared unimposing and somewhat somber; in its midst, however, it was a startlingly lively place, its lanes and avenues touched with the giddy effervescence of cutthroat commerce.

  On the following morning, Gideon passed through the gap where the gate had once been and hurried toward the central square, pushing through the early crowds and trying to ignore his sister's constant complaints from the basket he had slung across his back. It had seemed a clever idea at one time, since she was unable to keep up with his stride and thought that flying, save into the arms of her lover, was undignified; but the proximity to his ears proved to be less than ideal, especially when she was prone to make a point by stabbing at one or the other with her beak.

  An unfamiliar voice hailed him. He waved blindly and smiled, not yet above feeling good when he was recognized. He reckoned that would pass with time, as people grew accustomed to their freedom from the Wamchu; but for now, he vowed to enjoy it. It was certainly better than suffering the reactions of crowds who, to a fan, believed they could deal with a pass far better than he.

  "Christ, you didn't conquer Jerusalem, y'know," Tuesday said in his left ear.

  "Hush," he said over his shoulder.

  "Why? You're insufferable in the limelight."

  "And you are a duck."

  She reached for his ear, thought better of it, and kicked his spine instead.

  "Which means," he continued while waving again, "that you are food, my dear sister. Or have you forgotten?"

  Her grumping made him smile, and at the same time a little nervous. There had been a worsening food shortage in the city and countryside these past two weeks, a shortage only partly explained by the lack of sufficient crops being grown on the surrounding farms. According to gossip, something was amiss with the usually fertile soil, and the goods normally received from agrarian communities to the east and south were not arriving in their usual quantity. The merchants who trafficked in such produce were reluctant to discuss it; so reluctant, in fact, that they had taken to making their deliveries in the middle of the night, when they wouldn't have to face the wrath of their customers.

  She kicked his back again.

  He grunted and managed not to sell her at a handsome profit to a scroungy-looking vendor for the evening's meal; she was, he reminded himself, only keeping his ego in check. She was also, he thought grimly, cruising for a plucking.

  Another voice, a woman's, called his name, and she blew him a kiss from a doorway. He winked. He was kicked. He scowled and bulled on, only vaguely aware now of the artful pennants, flags, banners, and wash that were strung gaily and with noncomplementary abandon from houses and shops, over the int
ersections and, in a few cases, around people's necks.

  And as he approached the broad central square, he was for a moment saddened, and he paused to look around him. All these people had someplace to go, something to do, lovers to tryst with, wives to tiff with, creditors to argue with, customers to haggle with. They all had purpose. They all had dreams.

  And what did he have? A shirt, jeans, a pair of ragged boots. Not to mention the duck.

  He sighed, sighed again when he was kicked quite smartly on the spine, and turned left as he entered the open square, angling toward the back of a windowless building three times taller than any other in the city. It was the Hold, the former headquarters of Wamchu, and now the home of the only man who could shut his sister up and, at the same time, give him a deep and abiding sense of purpose. And if that didn't work, maybe a job sweeping up after hours.

  He stopped at the rear entrance and knelt, swung the basket around, and released his duck. She extended her wings, stretched her neck, and looked him straight in the eye.

  "Do we go in together?" she asked.

  "I guess."

  She managed a smile only a duck could see. "I'm supposed to be the nervous one."

  "I was thinking about last night."

  "No, you weren't. You were thinking about how miserable you are because they don't need a hero anymore." Her feathers puffed and settled. "I would guess there's nothing worse than a hero who hasn't got anyone to save."

  He rose and grinned down at her. "Sure there is. Remember those preserves you made before you disappeared?"

  She aimed a knife-like beak at his kneecap, and he dodged with a laugh, stepped inside, and paused until his eyes adjusted to the light.

  The room was fully half the size of the building, and as tall. On the far wall were two pairs of banded double doors; the one on the left led to belowground complex that included a superbly rotten dungeon, a throne room, and several richly appointed apartments for the use of whoever was in charge of the city at the time. The one on the right led to the roof.

  The floorspace, once deserted, was now used for public meetings, service organization luncheons, and the offices of the bureaucracy that had sprung back into existence since Wamchu, who had no use for such nonsense, had given up residence.