The night dragged on. Strangely coloured and flavoured food came and went. O'Neill sampled a bit here and a bit there and managed to have his fill.
The Count and his retinue ate sparingly but also steadily while they spent a great deal of time feting Daniel Jackson.
And then, finally, O'Neill recognised a few signs amid the conversation around him.
"You must be tired after such a long day on the road," the Count told Jackson. He had seen the looks that past between Teal'c and O'Neill and then caught Samantha Carter stifling a yawn.
Jackson translated.
"I could do with some sleep," Carter agreed.
Jackson translated back.
"Then by all means we should not keep any one up who is not comfortable to do so," he turned to his wife. "Could you escort the lovely Miss Sam'tha to her room?"
"Gladly," she agreed and nodded.
"I could use some sleep too," O'Neill said suddenly. "I am not as young as I used to be."
Jackson translated, and received a twittering of gentle laughter from the Countess's sisters that was all the more unsettling for its lack of mocking content.
"The Count and I have things we need to speak of," Jackson said and raised his eyebrows at O'Neill as if to add some significance to his words.
O'Neill smiled at Jackson coldly. Well if he hadn't figured it out for himself, O'Neill wasn't going to do it for him, no way.
*
The Count led Daniel Jackson out of the dinning room, through the draughty stone hallways and into a fire lit anteroom. A manservant hovered at the Count's beck and call. The candles in the chandelier had not been lit and the only source of illumination was the flickering fire.
The room was furnished with four high-backed winged chairs that had been upholstered with some of the most remarkably fine leather Jackson had ever seen. The chairs had a heavy appearance, but proved easier to slide closer to the fire that Jackson might have expected. He sank into the one that was offered to him by the Count's extravagant gesture.
"The air has developed a chill." The Count agreed. He turned to the manservant. Jackson hadn't heard his approach and restrained a start of surprise. "A brandy for me," the count said, "and for our guest…"
"I'll have the same," Jackson agreed.
"We have much to discuss on the morrow," the Count said affably.
"I wanted to speak with you about that, Jackson began.
"It is too late in the evening to discuss matters of business. That can wait until the morrow. This evening we need to discuss worldly matters. I know how it is for you people, all work, work, work, but that is not the best way to live your life. You should take the time to savour the scents and tastes of this world, experience the variety and the variability that this world has to offer."
The manservant returned with a tray. Two brandy snifters sat symmetrical on the tray and were proffered between the Count and Jackson.
Both were taken, and sipped.
"I believe that me and my companions have travelled much and experienced much of what you speak." Jackson said.
The count looked at Jackson over the brandy glass' oversized bulbous rim and nodded more with his eyelids than with his head, but his approval was obvious. "I suspect there is a large element of truth in what you say. There is a sophistication about your team, that is not what I had expected. The Countess informs me that your female retainer has a piece of jewellery piercing the skin of her navel. That is not a common thing to encounter."
That revelation caught Jackson by surprise. "It is not uncommon where I come from," he explained.
"You see what I mean then. Your team is not what I expected. They are much more focussed and aware of their surroundings than I would have expected of your retinue. But that is too close to the nature of tomorrow's business, and I promised that I would not discuss that until tomorrow, did I not?"
"That is true."
"Then Dan'el. Tell me about yourself. I want to hear it all."
Jackson yawned hugely, but began his story. It was all a fabrication of course.
*
If we had the capacity to perceive reality in more than the standard three physical, and one entropic, dimensions. (Not withstanding Steven Hawkins contention that time is a reversible dimension in much the same way that we can experience genuine reversibility in the other three physical dimensions, or any of the quantum mechanical explanations of the nature of the universe, we all know that the passage time is marked by entropy). Sorry, lost the train of thought there for a moment.
If we could see into the dark realms that surround this space-time construct that we use to translate the quantum nature of the universe to ourselves, we would note at this point in the narrative, the arrival of a black robed figure seated calmly atop a giant pale horse. The robe has the aspect of midnight about it, as though it were fashioned from actual midnight, as opposed to the use of midnight black material. The skeletal hands with which he pats the horses neck, don't just look emaciated, they look positively fleshless, which they are, in actual fact. They are quite fleshless.
He turned toward the viewer and grinned out from within the folds of his hooded robe. He had little choice in the nature of his facial expressions, given the lack of lips. "TIME TO GET TO WORK," said Death in a voice that still had clods of coffin covering loam dripping from its diphthongs and consonants.
In the dank and oppressive hidden hallways of the castle, a feast was under way. It is a particularly nasty scene and we will not spend too much time dwelling on the details. It involves a lot of naked people and a lot of screaming. It does not look like the one in the middle is having much fun at all.
Watching it all with an impassive stare and a wide grin, Death waited for his cue. His timing was impeccable. He was always late.
*
It was only a couple of minutes beyond the time when he entered his room that Jack O'Neill found his preparations for bed disturbed by a knock at the door. It was a timorous knock. Not one of your more assertive 'police in the middle of the night' kind of knocks but more of an 'I'm sneaking about and I don't want any one to see me in the corridor' kind of knocks. That meant that it wasn't Teal'c and probably not Daniel, and that left him with his first choice of companions; Samantha Carter.
Given the sort of tensions that were evident at the dinner table nothing would have surprised O'Neill at this moment. He hoped the Countess wasn't too disappointed and then changed his mind. He hoped she was completely disappointed.
Wearing an undershirt and combat pants, and the rapidly deteriorating second pair of socks he had worn that day, he padded over to the door. He still had his toothbrush in his mouth and a froth of toothpaste on his lips.
He opened the door. "Hi Sam," he began, "I hope the Countess…." and then ground to a halt in the face of both his own confusion and the blank look on the face of the raven headed woman standing on the other side of the door. "Oh, it's you again."
She looked up at him and frowned at the froth she saw on his mouth.
O'Neill realised that he had made a mistake in identification. It was the second one, the one who had not spoken to him before. She had just looked.
He waved a few confused gestures and then decided that the whole thing was too complicated to explain, what with the lack of common language, divergent conceptual schemas and the nature of tooth paste anyway, so he hurried back to the bath and washed his mouth out.
She walked past him and made for the Tapestry hanging from the far wall. She pointed to him and said, "We need to speak with you." Of course to O'Neill this came out as gobbledy gook, so there was not much chance that she was understood in his mind. She probably had no idea that it was possible to speak another language, O'Neill thought.
She noticed the blank expression on his face and shook her head. O'Neill shrugged and she turned away.
She marched for the door, pointed to the tapestry as though there was something significant about it and waved that he should look behind it.
He nodded as though in understanding.
She closed the door behind her when she left.
*
Pushing the tapestry aside revealed a hidden (well sort of) passage way. O'Neill stepped behind the tapestry and took a few steps. He stopped, looked around as though confused for a moment and then re-traced his steps.
He rummaged around in his gear, found his torch and stepped back through the tapestry covered entrance. At least now he could see where he was going.
Now which way to head. What were the options? There was left and there was the other left. Ah, he thought to himself, (we'll listen in anyway, but he doesn't know that we're here. He might get self-conscious if he knew, so we'll be very quiet) there was a breeze coming from the other left. He set off to the right.
O'Neill sneaked through the hallways of the castle, conscious of his foot falls all the way. They seemed to echo through the draughty stone cavern like gun shots.
He heard something ahead of him and stopped to listen. He even held his breath so he could hear better. Which only left the pounding of his heart and he couldn't find a way to still that. He listened harder to make up for the noise.
He drew his AK-47, released the safety and waited a bit more.
"Grrrrrrrr," said a voice from below waist height and about three metres ahead of him. OK, he decided, that was not a good sign. The voice had muscles in it, and claws, and worst of all, it seemed to be full of teeth.
That was a lot to conclude from an inarticulate growl, but it was one of those pre-programmed neural pathway kind of hard-wired things that his neural processor was programmed to identify. Evolution had given O'Neill's ancestors a concept of wolf that was hard to argue with.
"Nice doggy," he said.
A barrage from an AK-47 is seriously hard to disguise when it is let lose in a tunnel like the one that housed O'Neill and the angry wolf, so O'Neill discarded that option, but only for a moment. Right now, O'Neill's toddling toilet training was being tested for longevity. This mode of testing had been done to him a few times in the past and O'Neill is proof against this sort of test. It takes something a good deal better than a growling wolf to relax his control over his basis bodily functions.
Disappointed, the wolf thought it would have another go and produced a prolonged piece of glutteral grumbling.
Again no discernible result.
The wolf was having second thoughts about what it should do in the face of this lack of results. It usually hunted with a pack, and this time it was on its own. It had sort of backed itself into a corner however and would loose a lot of face if it backed off and thought these good second thoughts in the safety of a cave somewhere.
O'Neill was fingering the butt of the AK-47 again. He was pretty sure he could level it and provide the wolf with a few extra orifices if it was silly enough to pounce. He wasn't certain, but he was reasonably sure.
The wolf picked up on this whole quietly confident thing and wondered again if it was doing the right thing.
The tableau started to drag on a bit.
*
Samantha Carter was having difficulty sleeping. The bed was way too soft and the noise from outside was intruding through the timber shutter. It wasn't loud enough to wake her up but it was just barely loud enough to keep her awake.
If they shut up for a few minutes, she might be able to doze off, but there was no respite.
After tossing and turning and playing with the blankets so the draught stopped blowing down her spine, she finally decided to give up. She climbed from beneath the covers and sat on the edge of the bed and tried to decide what to do.
She felt around for her clothes, but the elves that had taken them away had not thought to return them in the dark. There was nothing for it. She would have to wear the Countess's dress. It was only a piece of lingerie anyway, so she had felt less concerned about sleeping in it than she did about the idea of walking around in it. She had done so earlier in the evening, but it had taken a fair amount of nerve then and the dress had become somewhat the worse for wear since.
She padded barefoot across the floor and reached the window. She opened one of the shutters and folded it back so she could see outside.
The torches were milling around still. The scene was much the same as she had seen earlier. For the second time that evening she wondered what was going on down there.
A cold breeze caressed the small of her bare back. She turned to look at the heavy tapestry suspended beside the window and frowned for a moment. She pushed it aside and revealed a passageway built into the wall between her room and the next one.
She needed a torch. There was a candle in the corridor outside her room's main entrance. She reached a decision.
*
A noise from further down the passageway caught the wolf's attention, like it needed more complications. A little later, O'Neill also heard the new sound. He set off and followed it along the corridor, cradling the AK-47 in the crock of his elbow while he waved his torch with his left hand.
He rounded a bend in the hall and almost shot Samantha Carter.
His finger itched, but he was a good boy and managed not to shoot. It would have been embarrassing and required a great deal of paperwork. Paper work was anathema. Paperwork was bad Karma. For a man who's mission reports addressed the headings of Who, What, Where, How and When, with single words, the idea of filling out the sixteen page mission accident report - sub-set injury to personnel (friendly fire); category, gun shot wounds, was enough to still his trigger finger.
In the confusion, the wolf had decided that this was a great opportunity to slink off and have a careful think. It had encountered a technical problem with its delivery and a bit of work wouldn't go astray before testing the toilet training of another human.
"What are you doing out at this hour of the night?" O'Neill hissed. His torch lit her face, so she squinted against the glare. He lowered the torch and then hurriedly turned it aside when he saw the state of Carter's dress. "Especially dressed like that."
"It's all they left me with Colonel," she explained and then she added; "And I'm doing the same as you," she hissed in return. "I'm snooping."
"Have you seen any thing?" O'Neill needed a distraction, any thing to get the memory of that dress out of his head.
"What haven't I seen," she hissed. "I've seen some very weird people who might be looking to seduce any and all of us, without due regard for gender or preference. I see people milling in the courtyard as though they are waiting for something to happen. I found a secret passageway linking my room with something else that I haven't found yet. And I find myself wondering just what they all think they're doing. Other than that I haven't seen much. What have you seen?"
"I think Daniel might be on the Count's shopping list," O'Neill suggested.
"I saw that," Carter agreed. "I hope Daniel knows what he's doing. Do you think he does?"
"Daniel?"
"Yeah."
They shared a vision. It wasn't telepathy but it was hard to tell the difference.
"I seem to remember," O'Neill said grimly, "that there must have been, I don't know, probably a dozen times, when I found him unconscious in the middle of some ancient temple. Probably more times. We've even found him dead a few times as well."
"Yeah," Carter said softly. "He might be in big trouble."
O'Neill nodded in the dark. It was a wasted gesture. "We should look for him," he said.
"Yeah," she agreed. "That seems a good idea. Any ideas?"
"Not a one."
"The count did lead him into the same wing as us," Carter said. "I remember hearing their voices walking past my door."
"OK, let's see if we can find him then."
*
They crept along another corridor.
"God the Lord of the manner is a creepy guy," Carter judged. "I keep expecting him to start counting things."
"Like the count in Sesame Street," O'Neill asked. He was aware of the early childhood trauma she had experienced. They had been caused by images of the Count and he was conscious of the problems such an image might cause her.
"Yeah," she said and shivered.
They walked on a bit further. Carter was unusually quiet.
"Is there something else bothering you?" O'Neill asked.
"You mean other than skulking through a castle full of… what we think might be Goa'ulds, while I'm wearing something about as protective as a piece of fog. Some one has my guns and hasn't given them back and we've lost Daniel to what seemed like a predatory bisexual. Other than that there's nothing bothering me."
"Nothing in particular then?" questioned O'Neill showing remarkable perspicacity.
"There's still something that I don't understand," Carter conceded. "Before I came out to investigate, there were people milling in the courtyard," Carter explained. "They were carrying torches but they were very quiet. It's the one aspect of this situation that I don't understand. What do you suppose that was about?"
It wasn't an idea that O'Neill wanted to consider. Complications were something that he could do without. O'Neill preferred simple. Simple was good. He liked Sylvester Stallone movies, the bad guy get's killed at the end and there's none of that complicated legal system junk to worry about. "I don't know what that might be, and I don't like the sound of that one bit. It sort of suggests a peasant underground group."
"A revolution about to happen?"
"The very thing."
"How will that effect our mission?"
"I don't…What was that noise?"
"Where?"
"Ahead of us. I heard a noise."
A light lit the corridor ahead of them.
"Quick hide," O'Neill hissed. He leapt for a tapestry that covered the wall. He threw it aside and squeezed against the wall behind it. He fingered the butt of his AK-47 and waited. Breathing deliberately slowly.
The footsteps approached their position slowly. Then stopped in front of O'Neill for a moment.
The tapestry was thrown aside. O'Neill raised his gun and was about to cock the firing mechanism when he realised that the face staring into his own was terribly familiar. "Teal'c," he hissed. "What're you doing here?"
"I would ask the same of you Colonel O'Neill. And also ask why were you hiding behind this tapestry with your feet sticking out from beneath the drape? I even recognised the mud pattern on them as belonging to you."
O'Neill looked down guiltily. "Oh… Right."
"I would suggest that you might hide better as well Major Carter."
"I'm not even wearing boots," Carter complained. "And my feet weren't sticking out."
"You aren't wearing much of any thing," agreed Teal'c. "But your perfume this evening was particularly fetching."
"Ohhh. Kayyy," said Carter. She gave an experimental tug on the tapestry. If she pulled hard it might come down. It would be better than wearing the dress she had been saddled with.
"Well," began O'Neill, "all we need now is for Daniel to find his way into this corridor and we'll have a complete set."
"Ah," said Teal'c, "Doctor Jackson is only a little way ahead of us, in this very corridor. He did, in fact, send me to find you. He has found something that might be of interest to all of us. If you would just follow me?"
Before she set off the join them, Carter gave one last longing look at the tapestry. The others were leaving and she didn't have enough time, she followed on, but vowed to do something of that ilk soon.