Tangle Box Read online

  He went to a pantry, pulled open the doors, reached in, triggered the release for the panel behind, and stepped back as the whole assemblage swung open with a ponderous effort. It took a few seconds; the panel was lined with steel.

  Biggar swooped down and landed on the top of the open pantry door. “I am your child, Horris,” he lamented disingenuously. “I have been like a son to you. You cannot desert me.”

  Horris glanced up. “I disown you. I disinherit you. I banish you from my sight forever.”

  From the front of the house came a pounding of fists on the locked door followed rather swiftly by a breaking of glass. Horris tugged nervously on one ear. No, there would be no reasoning with this bunch. The faithful had become a ragged mob of doughheads. Fools discovering their own lack of wit were famous for reverting to form. Would they be sadder but wiser for the experience? he wondered. Or would they simply stay stupid to the end? Not that it mattered.

  He had to stoop to pass through the opening behind the panel, which was well under his six-foot-eight height. He had raised all the other doors in the house when he had renovated it. He had told everyone that Skat Mandu needed his space.

  Inside was a stairway leading down. He triggered the release once more, and the heavy steel panel swung slowly back into place. Biggar flew through just as the door sealed and sped down the stairwell after Horris.

  “He was there behind you, you know,” the bird snapped, flying so close he brushed the other’s face with his wing tip. Horris lashed out with one hand, but missed. “Just for a minute, he was there.”

  “Sure he was,” Horris muttered, still a little unnerved by the experience, angry all over again for being reminded of it.

  Biggar darted past. “Trying to blame me for your mistakes won’t save you. Besides, you need me!”

  Horris groped for the light switch against the shadowed wall as he reached the bottom of the stairs. “Need you for what?”

  “Whatever it is you are planning to do.” Biggar flew on into the dark, smug in the knowledge that his eyesight was ten times better than Horris’s.

  “Rather confident of that, aren’t you?” Horris cursed silently as his searching fingers snagged on a splinter of wood.

  “If for nothing else, you need me as a cheering section. Face it, Horris. You cannot stand not having an audience. You require someone to admire your cleverness, to applaud your planning.” Biggar was a voice in the dark. “What is the purpose of concocting a well-devised scheme if there is no one to appreciate its intrinsic brilliance? How shallow the victory if there is no one to hail its masterful execution!” The bird cleared his throat. “Of course, you need me, too, to help with your new plan. What is it, anyway?”

  Horris found the light switch and flicked it on. He was momentarily blinded. “The plan is to get as far away from you as possible.”

  The basement spread away through a forest of timbered pillars that held up the flooring of the old manor house and cast their shadows in dark columns through the spray of yellow light. Horris marched ahead resolutely, hearing pounding now on the steel panel above. Well, let’s see what they can do with that! he sneered. He wound his way through the timbers to a corridor that tunneled back into shadow. Another light switch triggered a row of overheads, and stooping again to avoid the low ceiling, he started down the passageway.

  Again Biggar passed him by, a fleet black shadow. “We belong together, Horris. Birds of a feather and all. Come on. Tell me where we’re going.”

  “No.”

  “Very well, be mysterious if you must. But you admit we are still a team, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  “You and me, Horris. How long have we been together now? Think about all we’ve been through.”

  Horris thought, mostly about himself. Hunched down in a crablike stance as he angled through the narrow tunnel, legs bent, arms cranked in, nose plowing through musty air and dusty gloom, ears fanned out like an elephant’s, he considered the road he had traveled in life to arrive at this moment. It had been a twisty one, rife with potholes and sudden curves, slicked over with rain and sleet, brightened now and again with brief stretches of sunlight.

  Horris had a few things going for him in life, but none of them had served him very well. He was smart enough, but when the chips were down he always seemed to lack some crucial piece of information. He could reason things through, but his conclusions frequently seemed to stop one step short. He possessed an extraordinary memory, but when he called upon it for help he could never seem to remember what counted.

  Skill-wise, he was a minor conjurer—not a magician who pulled rabbits out of hats, but one of a very few in the whole world who could do real magic. Which was because he was not from this world in the first place, of course, but he tried not to dwell on that point since his abilities were somewhat marginal when measured against those of his fellow practitioners.

  Mostly, Horris was an opportunist. To be an opportunist one needed an appreciation for the possibilities, and Horris knew about possibilities better than he knew about almost anything. He was forever considering how something might be turned to his advantage. He was convinced that the wealth of the world—of any world—had been created for his ultimate benefit. Time and space were irrelevant; in the end, everything belonged to him. His opinion of himself was extreme. He, better than anyone, understood the fine art of exploitation. He alone could analyze the weaknesses that were indigenous to all creatures and determine how they might be mined. He was certain his insight approached prescience, and he took it as his mission in life to improve his lot at the expense of almost everyone. He possessed a relentless passion for using people and circumstance to achieve this end. Horris cared not a whit for the misfortune of others, for moral conventions, for noble causes, the environment, stray cats and dogs, or little children. These were all concerns for lesser beings. He cared only for himself, for his own creature comforts, for twisting things about when it suited him, and for schemes that reinforced his continuing belief that all other life-forms were impossibly stupid and gullible.

  Thus the creation of Skat Mandu and his cult of fervid followers, believers in a twenty-thousand-year-old wise man’s words as channeled by a myna.

  Even now, it made Horris smile.

  Horris admitted to only one real character flaw, and that was a nagging inability to keep things under his control once he started them in motion. Somehow even the most carefully considered and well planned of his schemes ended up taking on a life of their own and leaving him stranded somewhere along the way. And even though it was never his fault, it seemed that he was always, inexplicably, being relegated to the role of scapegoat.

  He reached the end of the corridor and stepped into a thirty-foot-square room which housed stacks of folding tables and chairs and crates of Skat Mandu pamphlets and reading material. The tools of his trade, enough fodder for a fine bonfire.

  He looked beyond the mounds of useless inventory to the single steel-lined door at the far side of the room and sighed wearily. Beyond that door was a tunnel that ran for almost a mile underneath the compound to a garage, a silver and black 4WD Land Cruiser, and safety. A careful planner was never without a bolt hole in case things went haywire, as they had just done here. He had not expected to put this one to use quite so soon, but circumstances had conspired against him once again. He grimaced. He supposed it was a good thing that he was always prepared for the worst, but it was an annoying way to live.

  He glared purposefully at Biggar, who was perched on the crates safely out of reach. “How many times have I warned you against giving in to acts of conscience, Biggar?”

  “Many,” Biggar replied, and rolled his eyes.

  “To no purpose, it seems.”

  “I’m sorry. I am only a simple bird.”

  Horris considered that mitigating circumstance. “I suppose you expect another chance, don’t you?”

  Biggar lowered his head to keep from snickering. “I would be most grateful, Horris.”


  Horris Kew’s gangly frame bent forward suddenly in the manner of a crouched wolf. “This is the last time I ever want to hear of Skat Mandu, Biggar. The last. Sever whatever lingering relationship you share with our former friend right now. No more private revelations. No more voices from the distant past. From this moment on, you listen only to me. Got it?”

  The myna sniffed. Horris didn’t understand anything, but there wasn’t any point in telling him so. “I hear and obey.”

  Horris nodded. “Good. Because if it happens again, I will have you stuffed and mounted.”

  His wintry gray eyes conveyed the depth of his feelings far more eloquently than his words, and Biggar’s beak clacked shut on the snappy retort he was about to make.

  From far back in the cellar came a rending sound—the prying of nailed wood away from its seating. Horris stared. The faithful were tearing up the floorboards! The steel door had not deterred them as completely as he had anticipated. He felt a tightening of his breathing passages as he hurried not toward the tunnel door but through the crates and furniture to a series of pictures bolted to the wall. He reached the fake Degas, touched a pair of studs in the gilt frame, and released the casing. It swung away on concealed hinges to reveal a combination safe. Horris worked the dial feverishly, listening to the sounds of the enraged mob as he did so, and when he heard the catch release, he swung open the layered steel door.

  He reached inside and withdrew an intricately carved wooden box.

  “Hope springs eternal,” he heard Biggar snicker.

  Well, it did, he supposed—at least in this instance. The box was his greatest treasure—and he had no idea what it was. He had conjured it up quite by accident shortly after coming into this world, one of those fortuitous twists of fate that occur every so often in the weaving of spells. He had recognized the importance of the box right from the first. This was a creation of real magic, the carvings ancient and spell-laden, rife with secret meaning. Something was sealed inside, something of great power. The Tangle Box, he had named it, impressed by the weave of symbols and script that ringed its surface. It was seamless and lidless, and nothing he did would release its secrets. Now and again he thought he could hear something give in its bindings, in the seals that bound it close about, but conjure though he might the box defied his best efforts to uncover what lay within.

  Still, it was his best and most important treasure from this world, and he was not about to leave it to those cretins who followed.

  He tucked the Tangle Box under his arm and hastened on across the room, weaving through the obstacle course of spare furniture and worthless literature to reach the tunnel door. There he worked with a steady hand a second combination dial set close against a lever that secured the door’s heavy locks, heard them release, and shoved down.

  The lever did not budge.

  Horris Kew frowned, looking a little like a truant caught out of school. He spun the dial angrily and tried the combination again. Still the lever would not budge. Horris was sweating now, hearing shouts to go along with the tearing up of floorboards. He tried the combination again and yet again. Each time, he clearly heard the lock release. Each time, the lever refused to move.

  Finally his frustration grew so great that he stepped back and starting kicking at the door. Biggar watched impassively. Horris began swearing, then jumping up and down in fury. Finally, after one last futile try at freeing the inexplicably recalcitrant lever, he sagged back against the door, resigned to his fate.

  “I can’t understand it,” he murmured woodenly. “I test it myself almost every day. Every day. And now it won’t work. Why?”

  Biggar cleared his throat. “You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Warn me? Warn me about what?”

  “At the risk of incurring your further displeasure, Horris—Skat Mandu. I told you he was displeased.”

  Horris stared up at him. “You are obsessing, Biggar.”

  Biggar shook his head, ruffled his feathers, and sighed. “Let’s cut to the chase, shall we, Horris? Do you want to get out of here or not?”

  “I want to get out,” Horris Kew admitted bleakly. “But …”

  Biggar cut him short with an impatient wave of one wing. “Just listen, all right? Don’t interrupt, don’t say anything. Just listen. Whether you like it or not, I am in fact in touch with the real Skat Mandu. I did have a revelation, just as I told you. I have reached into the beyond and made contact with the spirit of a wise man and warrior of another time, and he is the one we call Skat Mandu.”

  “Oh, for cripes sake, Biggar!” Horris could not help himself.

  “Just listen. He has a purpose in coming to us, a purpose of great importance, though he has not yet revealed to me what that purpose is. What I do know is that if we want out of this basement and away from that mob, we must do as he says. Not much is required. A phrase or two of conjuring, nothing more. But you must say it, Horris. You.”

  Horris rubbed his temples and thought about the madness that ran deep within the core of all human experience. Surely this was the apex. His voice dripped with venom. “What must I say, O mighty channeler?”

  “Skip the sarcasm. It’s wasted on me. You must speak these words. ‘Rashun, oblight, surena! Larin, kestel, maneta! Ruhn!’ ”

  Horris started to object, then caught himself. One or two of the words he recognized, and they were most definitely words of power. The others he had never heard, but they had the feel of conjuring and the weight of magic. He clutched the Tangle Box against his chest and stared up at Biggar. He listened to the sounds of the mob’s pursuit, louder now, the flooring breached and the basement open. Time was running out.

  Fear etched deep lines in his narrow face. His resistance gave way. “All right.” He rose and straightened. “Why not?” He cleared his throat. “Rashun, oblight, sur—”

  “Wait!” Biggar interrupted with a frantic flutter of wings. “Hold out the box!”

  “What?”

  “The Tangle Box! Hold it out, away from you!”

  Horris saw it all now, the truth behind the secret of the box, and he was both astonished and terrified by what it meant. He might have thrown down the box and run for his life if there had been somewhere to run. He might have resisted Biggar’s command if there had been another to obey. He might have done almost anything if presented with another set of circumstances, but life seldom gives you a choice in pivotal moments and so it was now.

  Horris held out the box before him and began to chant. “Rashun, oblight, surena! Larin, kestel, maneta! Ruhn!”

  Something hissed in Horris Kew’s ears, a long, slow sigh of satisfaction laced with pent-up rage and fury and the promise of slow revenge. Instantly the room’s light went from white-gold to wicked green, a pulsing reflection of some color given off deep within a primeval forest where old growth still holds sway and clawed things yet patrol the final perimeters of their ancient world. Horris would have dropped the Tangle Box if his hands would have obeyed him, but they seemed inexplicably locked in place, his fingers turned to claws about the carved surface, his nerve endings tied to the sudden pulse of life that rose from within. The top of the box simply disappeared and from out of its depths rose a wisp of something Horris Kew had thought he would never see again.

  Fairy mists.

  They rose in a veil and settled across the steel door that blocked entry to the tunnel, masking it like paint, then dissolving it until nothing remained but a vague hint of shadows at play against a black-holed nothingness.

  “Hurry!” Biggar hissed at his ear, already speeding past. “Go through before it closes!”

  The bird was gone in an instant, and his disappearance seemed to propel Horris Kew on as well, flinging himself after, still carrying the once-treasured box. He could have looked into it now to see what was hidden there. It was lidless, and he could have peeked to discover its secret. Once he would have given anything to do so. Now he dared not.

  He went through the veil, through
the web of fairy mists come somehow out of his past, eyes wide and staring, thinking to find almost anything waiting, to have almost anything happen. There was a sudden vision of vanishing gold coins and fading palatial grounds, the bitter tally of his losses, the sum total of five wasted years. It was there and then gone. He found himself in a corridor that lacked floor or ceiling or walls, a thin light that he swam through like a netted fish seeking to escape its trap. There was no movement around him, no sound, no sense of being or time or place, only the passage and the frightening belief that any deviation would see him lost forever.

  What have I done? he asked himself in terror and dismay.

  No answer came, and he struggled on like a man coated in hardening mud, the freeze of night working down to the marrow of his bones, the cold of his fate a certainty that whispers wretchedly of lost hope. He thought he could see Biggar, thought he could hear the bird’s paralyzed squawk, and took heart from the fervent hope that the miserable creature’s suffering was greater than his own.

  And then abruptly the mists were gone, and he was free of the paralytic light. It was night, and the night was velvet black, the warm air filled with pleasant smells and reassuring sounds. He stood upon a plain, the grasses thick and soft against his feet and ankles, their windswept flow running on like an ocean toward distant mountains. He glanced skyward. Eight moons glowed brightly—mauve, peach, burnt rose, jade, beryl, sea green, turquoise, and white. Their colors mixed and flooded down upon the sleeping land.

  It can’t be!

  Biggar emerged from somewhere behind him, flying rather unsteadily, lighting on the nearest of a cluster of what appeared to be small pin oaks colored bright blue. He shook himself, preened briefly, and glanced around.

  When he saw the moons, he jumped a foot. “Awk!” he croaked, forgetting himself momentarily. He spit in distaste and shivered. “Horris?” he whispered. His eyes were as wide as saucers, no small feat for a bird. “Are we where I think we are?”

  Horris was unable to answer. He was unable to speak at all. He simply stared skyward, then around at the landscape, then down at his feet, then at the rune-scripted surface of the Tangle Box, lidded once more and closed away.