The Talisman

and pressed them down. He opened the doors, and as he did, a widening bar of clean white light fell on his upturned, wondering face.
    7
    Sunlight Gardener happened to be looking back up the beach at the exact moment Jack dispatched the last of the five Guardian Knights. He heard a dull boom, as if a low charge of dynamite had gone off somewhere inside the hotel. At the same moment, bright light flashed from all of the Agincourt’s second-floor windows, and all of the carved brass symbols – moons and stars and planetoids and weird crooked arrows – came to a simultaneous stop.
    Gardener was decked out like some sort of goony Los Angeles SWAT squad cop. He had donned a puffy black flak-vest over his white shirt and carried a radio pack-set on a canvas strap over one shoulder. Its thick, stubby antenna wavered back and forth as he moved. Over his other shoulder was slung a Weatherbee .360. This was a hunting rifle almost as big as an anti-aircraft gun; it would have made Robert Ruark himself drool with envy. Gardener had bought it six years ago, after circumstances had dictated that he must get rid of his old hunting rifle. The Weatherbee’s genuine zebra-skin case was in the trunk of a black Cadillac, along with his son’s body.
    ‘Morgan!’
    Morgan did not turn around. He was standing behind and slightly to the left of a leaning grove of rocks that jutted out of the sand like black fangs. Twenty feet beyond this rock and only five feet above the high-tide line lay Speedy Parker, aka Parkus. As Parkus, he had once ordered Morgan of Orris marked – there were livid scars down the insides of that Morgan’s large white thighs, the marks by which a traitor is known in the Territories. It had only been through the intercession of Queen Laura herself that those scars had not been made to run down his cheeks instead of his inner thighs, where they were almost always hidden by his clothes. Morgan – this one as well as that one – had not loved the Queen any better for her intercession . . . but his hatred for Parkus, who had sniffed out that earlier plot, had grown exponentially.
    Now Parkus/Parker lay face-down on the beach, his skull covered with festering sores. Blood dribbled listlessly from his ears.
    Morgan wanted to believe that Parker was still alive, still suffering, but the last discernible rise and fall of his back had been just after he and Gardener arrived down here at these rocks, some five minutes ago.
    When Gardener called, Morgan didn’t turn because he was rapt in his study of his old enemy, now fallen. Whoever had claimed revenge wasn’t sweet had been so wrong.
    ‘Morgan!’ Gardener hissed again.
    Morgan turned this time, frowning. ‘Well? What?’
    ‘Look! The roof of the hotel!’
    Morgan saw that all of the weathercocks and roof ornaments – beaten brass shapes which spun at exactly the same speed whether the wind was perfectly calm or howling up a hurricane – had stopped moving. At the same instant the earth rippled briefly under their feet and then was still again. It was as if a subterranean beast of enormous size had shrugged in its hibernal sleep. Morgan would almost have believed he had imagined it if it had not been for the widening of Gardener’s bloodshot eyes. I’ll bet you wish you never left Indiana, Gard , Morgan thought. No earthquakes in Indiana, right?
    Silent light flashed in all of the Agincourt’s windows again.
    ‘What does it mean, Morgan?’ Gardener asked hoarsely. His insane fury over the loss of his son had for the first time moderated into fear for himself, Morgan saw. That was a bore, but he could be whipped back into his previous frenzy again, if necessary. It was just that Morgan hated to have to waste energy on anything at this point that didn’t bear directly on the problem of ridding the world – all the worlds – of Jack Sawyer, who had begun as a pest and who had developed into the most monstrous problem of Sloat’s life.
    Gardener’s pack-set squawked.
    ‘Red Squad Leader Four to the Sunlight Man! Come in, Sunlight Man!’
    ‘Sunlight Man here, Red Squad Leader Four,’ Gardener snapped. ‘What’s up?’
    In quick succession Gardener took four gabbling, excited reports that were all exactly the same. There was no intelligence the two of them hadn’t seen and felt for themselves – flashes of light, weathercocks at a standstill, something that might have been a ground-temblor or possibly an earthquake preshock – but Gardener labored