Glory gritted her teeth. I don't care. She regarded the glittering castle with narrowed eyes, a dull purposeful anger filling her heart to the exclusion of everything else. I don't care who brought me here—Erchane Incarnate, or the Warmother, or that Dreamer of Worlds bimb. It doesn't matter. The end result is the same.
She was here for the Allimir. It was just too bad for Earth, and whatever test Humanity was about to flunk for the eleven-hundredth time, but she'd been asked to this party by the Allimir, and now they had her. They had Vixen the Slayer, Vixen the Red, Scourge of the Night, Harrower of Hell, Doomslayer, Koroshiya, Hell's Own Harpy. And she had the Sword of Cinnas. That couldn't have been part of anybody else's plans!
Win, lose, or toes-up: she'd come to these games to compete. Stone the rules and stone the judges. She had the playbook. She was going to play.
Abruptly, Glory wasn't afraid, not the way she had been when she first saw the castle. She was still afraid of pain, and afraid of dying, certainly (though she hoped she was just a little more afraid to fail), but she wasn't afraid of the Warmother, not his/her/itself. You had to respect something on some level to be properly afraid of it, and Glory had never respected a bully. There was no self-discipline in being a bully.
She stroked Ivradan's hair. Poor little bugger. He didn't deserve to be here any more than the ponies had.
"I can't leave Dylan alone in there, thick as he is. And this is what I came for." To be murdered in an alien dimension by a crazed demon just to get out of a publicity tour? "To try to make her stop. So I reckon I've got to go in there after her. I can't say what's going to happen then. I'm sorry. I reckon I'm not too good at making other people's choices for them. I did my best, but maybe it isn't much of a best. I won't ask you to do anything you don't think you can do, Ivradan. I reckon you could try to make it back down the trail alone, if you want . . ." She stopped, unable to finish the sentence. She knew he wouldn't make it to the bottom alive, and if he did, the army would be there.
Either way—stay or go—he'd be dead.
"But you . . . you will go on?" Ivradan whispered, at last. He sat up, and brushed his hair back out of his eyes. His cap had fallen off, and his burnt-chestnut hair was as unkempt as the mane of one of his own horses. He looked hollow-eyed, like a man who had faced down Death and accepted his mortality.
"I'm stupid that way," Glory said with a faint wistful smile. She offered him her elephant.
"This is Gordon. Ever since I was a little girl, I carried him with me everywhere, especially when I thought I was going to places I wasn't going to like."
Ivradan regarded the stuffed blue elephant with an unreadable expression.
"A doll," he said at last.
"Hey! This is a genuine interdimensional stuffed elephant from the world of Vixen the Slayer, which has accompanied her to the very wellspring of the Oracle," Glory said, desperately hoping to make him smile.
Ivradan regarded Gordon with more respect, and picked him up as he'd seen Glory do. "I will go with you, Slayer," he said, getting to his feet.
"No worries," Glory said automatically, standing as well. After all, we're dead one way or the other, seems to me. Maybe we can really piss this Charane bint off before we die.
She put her arm around Ivradan's shoulders, and side by side they started across the lawn toward the Warmother's castle.
Was this the worst idea she'd had in a long history of having not terribly good ideas? Glory wondered to herself. She knew a sane person would be peeing themselves in terror at this point, but the strongest feeling she was conscious of was irritation.
She had a lot of time to wonder about her own sanity in the time it took to cross the lawn and lead Ivradan up the steps of the castle.
The inside seemed to be much larger than the outside.
There was a short entry hall and the walls were mirrored. In their flawless reflection, Glory could see herself clearly for the first time in many days.
Though her hair was braided and still wet from the clouds, it still managed to be frizzy and unkempt, and it was several days late for a wash. The bruise on her cheekbone was fading to greens and yellows, showing through the pancake she'd hastily applied this morning. Her eye makeup was smudged and runny, ringing her eyes in a sloppy raccoon mask, and she'd eaten off all her lipstick hours ago. Her leather was scuffed and battered, desperately in need of a good polish and some decent care. She'd torn a couple of the chrome studs off here and there, and the crushed velvet panniers were crumpled and dusty. Her shoulders were peeling, and the bandage Tavara had put on her arm was grimy and tattered.
Dylan had been right. She was a mess. A joke. A—
"Don't look," Ivradan said urgently. She turned toward him. He was staring fixedly at the floor. "You will lose yourself if you look into her mirrors."