Making a grab for the bird

Bloodflies are actually quite beautiful. They appear to be huge butterflies, sometimes having a wingspan of five inches, and their wings are delightfully colored and covered in fascinating patterns. They smell good, too. You want to get close to them, so you can examine the lovely wing pattern and marvel at the lively hues. You want to hold still, and let the thing investigate you, and find the perfect spot of exposed skin on you to land on. And it won't just land; no, what it'll do is spread its wings and flatten itself against you, at which point you'll feel a pinch that signals that the bloodfly has tapped into your circulatory system. And now you have the thing permanently attached to you, unless you remove it by force, leaving a huge scar that never quite stops bleeding, or until you die. Since bloodflies always travel in swarms, and the one that found you will alert the others of its swarm that it's found prey, death will most likely come very quickly, as they surround you in a brightly colored cloud, fighting each other for space on any exposed inch of flesh, and they suck you dry faster then you thought possible. People can, and have, studied them quite extensively, while sheathed in fully sealed containment armor.

I, of course, did not have containment armor. If I was very careful, I wouldn't need it. See, it is possible to get very close to a bloodfly swarm if you are very careful, while they are in their sleep phase. The get logy in cooler temperatures, and several infestations have been destroyed by approaching very, very quietly, and lighting the suckers on fire. Whatever makes their coloring so bright also makes them very, very flammable.

If I wanted to, I could take my lighter out of my pocket and apply it to the bloodflies that hung in huge numbers from the chandelier above me in the ruined ballroom, making it look for all the world like there was a tie-dyed Christmas tree hanging from the ceiling. Touching it to one of them would have set the whole swarm ablaze in moments. Of course, then I would have been buried under the weight of several hundred pounds of dead, burning insects, so I wasn't about to go for my lighter. I needed these things alive for a while.

Moving as quietly as I could, I moved to the center of the room, just under the chandelier on which the bloodflies were most heavily festooned, and pulled two things out of my pocket. The first was a small, round device with a ruby set into the top of it, and the second was a type of firework, designed to spray a shower of sparks about a dozen feet, when activated. I attached the activator for the spark-thrower to the ruby-topped device, and set both on the floor, directly under the lowest hanging part of the slumbering swarm. Then I turned the ruby one half turn in it's setting, and waited five interminable seconds until it began to shine. Then, almost shaking with relief, I Stepped out of that dimension, arriving at my final destination.

I arrived on the side of a rocky hill, looking out over a small compound set on the edge of a desert. I was hidden by a copse of trees to keep my arrival from being noticed, and after taking a moment to check the local landmarks to make sure I'd come to the right place, I began walking the half-mile to the gate of the compound.

I felt like I was carrying a couple hundred pounds of dead weight while walking up a steep hill. The mystical cord that bound me to the place I'd started out wanted to pull me back to that place, and each step was just a bit harder to take than the last. I was almost where I needed to be, though, and when I was, I could stop fighting it and let it do what it wanted, let it go home and take me with it.

The feeling of weight helped with my disguise. I was wearing loose, badly made clothing of the local variety, and a turban. My plodding walk and hunched posture, caused by the pull of the cord, made me look as beaten down as the locals, and, for added verisimilitude, I had removed the Hand, back at my starting point, and held the stump of my left arm against my side. I looked like life had worked me over pretty hard, and like I expected it to keep doing so. Just like the locals.

I arrived at the gate of the compound. A small hole, set behind a grate, popped open in response to my rhythmic knock, and then closed after accepting the note I proffered. A few minutes later, a door opened in the gate and I was pulled roughly through.

I found myself in a courtyard, surrounded by buildings that looked like adobe, and by a half dozen armed guards. They pushed me around a bit while passing my note back and forth, until what looked like their captain walked up, trailed by another of the guards.

The captain read the note. He sized me up with a beady eye for a moment before stepping forward and shouting something directly into my face. His breath was unpleasant, but his closeness did let me see that he had one silver tooth, right up in front. Jackpot.

Standing almost nose to nose with the foul-breathed captain, I said the one word of the local language I had learned. The guards around the two of us froze for a second, then began to glance at each other in that universal way people do when someone crosses a line and is about to get a serious beating thrown on them. The captain froze, too, his face turning a bright red. He grabbed me by the throat, and had opened his mouth to begin shouting in earnest, when I reached up to take hold of his wrist with my one good hand, and stopped holding out against the pull of the cord.

Instantly, the captain and I were pulled out of that dimension, the cord yanking my body in an odd direction, and him coming with me because of our physical contact. There were four pauses lasting less than a second apiece, as we were reeled back to my staring point. The first pause was in the ruined ballroom where I had set the spark-thrower under the swarm of bloodflies. The second found us on a a tree reaching across a deep gorge over a raging river. Third came a bubble of air, deep underwater, with us in the center of a circle of black boxes, and lastly we blinked through a metal room, the airlock of a space station.

Is we passed through each, the four small devices, inset with rubies, I had left at each spot activated another item I had left behind. If anyone in the compound we had just left possessed the ability to follow me across dimensions, they would find themselves stepping into something quite deadly at each Step. The spark-thrower would have already ignited the swarm hanging above it, filling the ruined ballroom with fire. Explosives on the tree would have split it and dropped it into the river below, leaving a pursuer to arrive without support in mid-air. The black boxes holding the bubble of air open at the bottom of an ocean would have deactivated, allowing the water to rush back and fill that area with its killing pressure. And the airlock on the space station would be opening, exposing the next person to Step into that spot to the void of space.

If there was anyone who could follow me and survive all of that, just to get the captain back, I'd probably just let them have him. They would be way out of my league.

Not that it would have been my problem, if someone had followed us to the end of the line, since the last stop was Jubjub's aerie.

Jubjub's raths, green pig-like creatures, took charge of the captain as soon as we arrived, and by 'took charge' I mean 'tackled and began to summarily pummel'. This set the borogoves seated on ledges all about the wide room to burbling and chortling in evident joy.

“Oh, frabjous day!” This came as a cry from across the room, where Jubjub had been lounging. It outgrabed loudly in happiness as it strode across the room. “Ah, Redhand, thou'rt manxome in pursuit of that which thine eye desires! Truly, it soothes my frumious temper to have this uffish oaf of a thief returned to me for well earned punishment. Beamish, I am, I say I am beamish, the mimsy mood has fled, with your galumphing back to me, bearing that which I requested! Callooh! Callay!”

If you're wise, you will never comment on how much Jubjub looks like an angry chicken. It's killed for less, much less. But this loud, absurd bird was also possessed information I needed. The borogoves, the raths, and the toves it employed were all constantly ferreting out secrets which were brought back to the mercurial Jubjub, who then bartered them to any who could meet his price.

The book-locket I had shown to Jack and Van Zandt had led her to suggest a few names as to who might be able to identify it. They had all come up empty, but each had suggested the same individual as the next person to ask. She, of course, had vanished some time ago, on one of the exploratory expeditions that were her specialty. And the only one, apparently, who knew her location, was Jubjub the information broker. So here I was, delivering the captain, who had stolen I know not what from the bird, in return for a location.

“Glad to hear it, Mes-sire Jubjub,” I said, feeling a load lift from me as the 5-dimensional cord that had reeled the captain and me in was removed. “Very glad. So, as I promised, your thief has been returned directly to you. Do you have something for me?” I went about reattaching the Hand and changing my clothes as nonchalantly as possible, praying there wouldn't be any complications.

“Aha, to business, yes, o manxome one!” Jubjub clucked, pulling a green crystal out from... somewhere. “All information, pertinent as can be, which you requested. Jubjub thanks you for your patronage, yes, and begs you to come again soon!”