Asgard's Heart Read Online Free Page B

my
face, staring at it as one tends to stare at an object that has unexpectedly
started behaving in a perverse manner.
    "You want me to come for a walk in the
garden?" I asked guardedly.
    "That's what I said," she confirmed. She
sounded slightly bad-tempered, but there was nothing unusual about that. What
was unusual was that she was talking about gardens as if I was supposed to know
what she meant. I thought about it for a moment, and had little difficulty
figuring out which garden she meant, but couldn't for the life of me fathom out
her reasons for wanting me to go there. One thing was certain though, and that
was the fact that she must have a reason. She was not normally given to circumlocution
or to guessing games.
    Something was obviously wrong. I wondered whether it
was the same kind of something wrong that I had already encountered, or an
entirely unconnected kind of something wrong. Troubles seem never to come
singly.
    "Okay," I said, in an off-hand manner.
"The garden. Give me twenty minutes to wake up, and I'll be there."
    I was proud of myself for giving no more than the
slightest indication that I'd had difficulty working out what she meant, and I
further demonstrated my initiative by waiting until I had showered and
breakfasted, and was well away from my room, before asking the Isthomi if they
could get me to the enclosed region which they'd used as an arena on my first
visit to this level, to stage the big fight between the Star Force and Amara
Guur's mobsters, and to fake Myrlin's death by fire at the less-than-tender
hands of Susarma Lear.
    The Isthomi opened up one of their convenient doorways
into the hidden recesses of their world, and laid on a robot car which whizzed
me away through curving tunnels at breathtaking pace. It was a longer journey
than I expected—although it had never before occurred to me to wonder whether
the maze in which my last adventure had taken place was geographically close to
the essentially- similar one in which I'd found myself on the earlier occasion.
I had nothing to do during the journey but worry about the speed at which I was
traveling, and wish that it didn't seem quite so much like a kind of repeating
nightmare I'd suffered from in my youth—a stereotyped dream from which most
    microworlders
are said to suffer.
    Eventually, the car stopped and another doorway opened
up beside me, through which I stepped into a hothouse world of gigantic
flowers, vivid in hue and sharply scented. They presented a riot of colour—mostly
purples and golds in this particular spot, which was dominated by a single vast
bush, whose branches were tangled into an inextricable mess, and whose convolvuline
blossoms looked like a scene from a surreal bell-factory. Given the host of
mythological references that every waking moment now evoked, I could hardly
help thinking of the bush as a Gordian knot, though it would have taken a much
mightier hand than mine to slash it with a massive sword.
    "Colonel Lear!" I called, mindful of her
instruction that military protocol was still to be observed between us. I
looked in either direction along the grey wall that curved away to my left and
right, with a thin green verge which could serve as a path, if only I knew
which way to go.
    The door by which I had been admitted had closed
silently and seamlessly behind me, but now another opened, a dozen metres away,
and Susarma Lear stepped through. She was, as always, wearing her Star Force
uniform, the black cloth contrasting in a remarkably pleasing fashion with the
dazzling shock of blonde hair surrounding her face. She was also wearing a
sidearm—one of the guns she'd taken from the Scarida when she'd come to my
rescue while I was making my painful contact with the gods of Asgard.
    The way she was holding her stern jaw made me wince.
It wasn't hard to believe that the icy stare in her bright blue eyes could turn
men into stone.
    "Hello, Rousseau," she said, soberly.
"Thanks for being so quick on the