The Warslayer(75)

"But why this? It's like she's quit. Where's the fun for her in just locking us up somewhere in a magic dungeon to starve to death?"

"Perhaps," Ivradan said in a peculiar voice, "in that we could get out if we would."

Glory stopped pacing and stared at him.

"Slayer, I have been thinking," Ivradan said, still looking as if he'd suddenly swallowed a live carp. "About the horses."

"Yes," Glory said quietly. If she startled him now, she'd never hear what he had to say, and it might well be important.

"You remember the mist on the trail, and how they walked into it without changing their gait? And how, when they reached the summit, even though there was green grass all around, they would not graze?"

"I remember," Glory said.

"That is not how horses behave, and it has puzzled me, but now I think I have found an answer. I do not believe they saw either the mist or the grass, though we did, and felt them, too. Could it be that they were not there at all? And if such things could be illusion, could not this prison be illusion as well?"

"Oh, sure," Glory said flippantly, and then thought about it. Hard.

If Ivradan said the horses didn't react to the mist and the grass because they were illusions, he probably had the right of it. And if the two of them were stuck in a dungeon that wasn't really here, that would be enough of a giggle to keep Charane amused, wouldn't it? Watching them commit suicide in a prison that wasn't one?

"If it is an illusion, how do we make it go away?" she asked.

Ivradan sat up and looked at her hopefully. Glory sighed. He was right. It was the sidekick's job to come up with the fool notion, and the hero's job to make it work. Division of labor. Only she hadn't the faintest idea of how that was to be accomplished. The dungeon certainly looked—and felt—real.

As real as the grass—and the mist—had.

Not much to go on, that.

She walked over to the wall and leaned her forehead against it, concentrating on its not being there. The wall remained stubbornly solid.

"Slayer—" Ivradan said in an awed whisper.

She opened her eyes. Bright violet light illuminated the wall, casting her image upon it in sharp black shadow. The Sword of Cinnas had woken up, glowing as brightly as it had back in the Temple.

"Oh, silly me," Glory said weakly. "I've been using the wrong end of the sword."

She stepped back from the wall and—feeling just a bit as if she were playing Joan of Arc—drew the sword and grasped it below the crosspiece, where the blade was dull. The violet crystals set in the hilt glowed as though lit from within, almost too bright to look at directly.

"Ivradan—come here."

She could wield the sword, she could play the hero, but she couldn't believe in this as much as the Allimir could. And what they needed right now was belief. Whole cartloads of it.

Reluctantly, Ivradan approached, still clutching Gordon. The bullet had blown the back of the stuffed elephant open, and most of its stuffing had escaped, so Gordon was now a rather saggy baggy elephant, but that didn't matter. If they got out of here, Glory promised herself she'd get him the best new innards money could buy.

"This is the Sword of Cinnas, with which he chained the Warmother back in the Time of Legend. It is full of Erchane's magic, and it is strong enough to destroy this illusion. Put your hand over mine," she said in Vixen's ringing tones.

She felt Ivradan's hand tremble as he placed it over hers. And then, slowly, keeping her mind studiously blank, she moved the glowing crosspiece of the sword toward the wall, trying not to expect failure.

As the power crystals neared the wall, she felt resistance, the kind you'd get if you tried to push two magnets together the wrong way. Glory became enormously heartened by this, suddenly believing it all herself. This was an illusion. The sword would get them out. She wasn't thinking beyond that, to actually getting away.

It became harder to push the sword forward, and she felt a pang of alarm—suppose it was destroyed the way the bear-wolf's talisman had been when she brought it into the Oracle-cave? But even with all the jewels dark, the sword would still be a sword, its blade still sharp, and they had to get out of here.

They had to get out of here.

The hilt clattered against the wall, and Glory felt a sharp pang of cheated disappointment. It hadn't worked. The wall was still there.

But wasn't the sound of the sword's impact a little wrong, the feel of it hitting the wall not quite right? She forced herself to notice those subtle things, to believe them, to keep pushing as if there were someplace for the sword to go, because the wall mustn't be there, the dungeon couldn't hold them. It was all false, unreal, a thing of illusion, and an illusion that had just been routed by superior firepower, at that. She told herself that fervently, demanding that it be true, because she needed it to be true. For Ivradan's sake, and Belegir's, and because she wasn't dead yet, and she'd promised to destroy the Warmother. . . .