by C. E. Murphy
Lorhen fell silent, lips pursed, then dropped his chin in a nod. “Sorry. I forget.”
“That you’ve been lying to me for a decade?”
“I’m always me underneath the name I choose or the role I play, Emma. Once someone knows—which doesn’t happen often—it’s easy to let myself forget who I’m ‘supposed’ to be. It’s like taking a corset off.”
“So you’re saying Lorhen is considerably more of a jackass than Logan Adams.”
A faint smile twisted Lorhen’s mouth. “Probably.” He hesitated. “Do you really think I’m a sexist pig?”
“What? Oh.” Emma glanced at the tablet. “No. No, that isn’t one of your faults. Have you worn corsets a lot?”
“Almost never. They haven’t often been fashionable for men, and even then mostly only for fat men. I’ve always been slim.”
Emma nodded. “All right. Your point about Atlantis, then?”
Another brief smile pulled at his lips. “The point was that the crystal was made in Atlantis, by Atlanteans, or at least, by their gods. The ones I knew certainly didn't know how, not anymore.”
“Their gods?”
“That’s what they called them. Somebody made them, anyway, and it might as well have been gods.” Lorhen frowned at his last bite of toast, then shook his head. “I think I used to know more about it, but I don’t anymore.”
“Gods aren’t real, Lorhen.”
“Hah. Aren’t they? The Timeless exist, and we can do what any reasonable person would consider magic. I carry a sword around a major metropolitan area in broad daylight every single day and nobody stops to comment, much less arrest me. That’s ma—”
“I’d like to see it.”
Lorhen’s eyebrows shot upward. “My sword? Goodness, Emma, are you flirting with me?”
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
“Of course not.” Lorhen still grinned as he left the remains of his breakfast and went to the couch to extract a hand-and-a-half sword from the folds of a coat which, to Emma’s eyes, lay loose across the back of the couch, incapable of hiding anything rigid. He cast the scabbard aside easily and returned to offer the blade, hilt first, to Emma, who took it with a surge of surprise. She knew he had at least two knives on him, but Timeless didn’t offer the blades that kept them alive up for inspection casually. He was trying, not subtly, to earn her trust again, and they both knew it.
Irritatingly, she could feel it working. More effectively than cooking for her, although she had to lower her eyes swiftly to examine the blade to hide amusement at the thought. He would probably read it anyway: the Timeless were exceptionally good at sensing the smallest shifts in emotion. As they should be, with decades or centuries—or in Lorhen’s case, millennia—of practice.
The sword was about four feet long from pommel to tip, with the blade itself making up around three feet of it. There were no unnecessary decorations: the crossguard was broad enough to provide protection and the pommel looked like it could crack a skull effortlessly, but neither shone with jewels or even engravings. The leather wrapped around its hilt shone soft with use and fit her hands better than she would have expected. Both her hands: she’d seen Lorhen wield it one-handed easily, but her instinct was to wrap both hands around the hilt, snugged against one another. “It weighs less than I thought.”
“Around three pounds. Even Timeless get tired. A lighter blade is less wearying, especially if you use it one-handed, and I like to keep one hand free if I can.”
“For the heartstrike,” Emma murmured. Anyone, Timeless or not, would die if their head was taken, but to release the Blending, the magic that Timeless carried inside themselves, a blow to the heart had to be struck before the head was taken. Otherwise the Blending simply disappeared, returning to the ether. The Keepers theorized that new Timeless were made that way, somehow absorbing the free magic, but there was no way to know for certain.
“For the heartstrike,” Lorhen agreed. “I never did go for the big swords. They’re too slow, but these ones, what you mostly call bastard swords these days, are light and fast and still have enough hilt that you can use it two-handed if you really need the power. You hold it well.”
“I’ve been a Keeper for sixteen years, Lorhen. I’ve learned a couple of things about swords in that time.” She reversed the blade and offered it back to him, and he took it with a thoughtful look.
“But not how to use one. I’ve always thought that was an oversight on the Keepers’ part. Not that I would go around saying so.”
“Except to me?”
Lorhen gave her a half smile and went to put the sword away. Even watching, she couldn’t see where it went: it simply faded into the folds of his coat, no longer visible even though she knew it had to be there. “It’s magic,” he said again. “And there are other a lot of other legends that have nothing to do with us. Monsters, demons, gods, spirits, things that aren't Timeless-based stories at all. Elements of magic we can't explain. What made Atlantis special, and really, what makes it remembered, is that they were able to harness that power to a degree no one has ever duplicated. Christ's holy Grail, the sword they called Excalibur. They bred unicorns, Emma."
"Unicorns." Emma’s eyebrows rose.
“I know.” Lorhen came back to the breakfast bar to mop up the last drips of yolk with a crust of toast. "They weren’t horses, though. More like war-rhinos, except more delicate than rhinos. About that graceful, though, graceful the way killing machines are, not in fanciful light tripping fairy-like ways. The horns were only about—" He spread his hand wide, indicating the distance from pinky tip to thumb. "That long. Thick. Brutal. They were incredibly difficult to kill, but they drowned when Atlantis did." He looked up, eyes black. "I don't know if it was knowledge they had, or something about the island itself, but they were able to create artifacts of immense power, artifacts which have frequently taken on lives of their own. I don't know what else drowned with Atlantis, and frankly, I don't want to. There were too many things of power. I'd rather they stayed under the ocean." He finished the last of his juice. "Now. How are we going to kill me so that I can gain my immortality and hornswoggle the Keepers?"
“I don’t know. How did you die the first time?”
"Don't remember."
"That must make you the only Timeless in the world who doesn't remember his first death." Emma got up to clear the dishes as Lorhen spun on his stool to watch her.
"I'm the only Timeless who was there before the pyramids were built, too. Coincidence, or conspiracy? The thing is, it's got to be public enough that a Keeper will see it, or hear about it soon, but not so much as to get the police involved."
Emma sighed. "The police usually get involved when there's a violent death, Lorhen. That’s their job.”
“I could get in a car wreck."
"In whose car!"
Lorhen grimaced. "Maybe not. I’m afraid Logan Adams is the sort to get mugged.”
A slow, not particularly pleasant smile crept across Emma’s face. Lorhen pointed an accusing finger at her. “You can’t mug me, Emma. What would be your excuse?”
“It would be extremely satisfying.”
“Emma.” Lorhen managed to look injured. She huffed disbelievingly, and he pulled the tablet back toward himself. “Cathal’s been in Chicago a while. We could go up to this lecture and see if he’s met anybody who could mug me while we’re there.”
“We?”
“C’mon.” Lorhen gave her a sly smile. “Don’t tell me the Keeper in you wouldn’t like to listen in on a lecture while a man who was really there whispers the truth into your ear.”
Emma acknowledged the temptation with a wrinkle of her nose. “Who’s going to pay for it?”
“We could expense it to the Keepers.”
“There are dozens of Keepers in Chicago, Lorhen. Why would they pay for us to fly up instead of just having the locals go?”
“Because I’m the head researcher on ancient-world Timeless and it would be absurd to send anyone
else.”
“…that’s a very good argument.”
Lorhen, dryly, said, “I do have several thousand years of practice at getting my own way, Emma. Call Cathal, will you, and tell him to rent a bigger hotel room. The Keepers won’t put us up in style.”
5
She couldn't remember how thick the walls had been.
It doesn't matter, the patient one told her. We have time.
But I want to remember! she raged back. It seemed likely that it really didn't matter. The textures of the walls had been changed utterly by the cataclysm that drowned the city; almost certainly the depth of the walls had been changed by the same events.
Never-the-less, as she scraped and tore away fragments of stone, she tried frantically to remember. As deep as her forearm was long? Leaning in the door, did the stone stretch wider that the breadth of her shoulders, to encompass her safely in the carved structure? Had there been windows she could reach through?
Had there been windows at all? The wedge of stone slipped from her hands as she drifted in the water, trying to bring the memory of the original room to mind.
No doors! No windows! Always smooth, always safe, keeping us here inside! the frightened one insisted. Always here.
No. She shoved the voices away, trying desperately to focus. She curled on her side, catching her hair over an arm to prevent it from wrapping around her face. Had there been windows? The wide floor she could envision, from eons of testing it with fingertips. The walls, she knew, had never been so smooth, but they had curved into the arched roof in the same essential structure of her prison.
The door had been deliberately simple, wide and carved with the symbols of the Houses. The memory slipped in and out, foggy, sometimes teasing her with the idea that the door had not been deep enough to outstretch her shoulders, other times insisting with an almost physical shock that she had fit neatly between the two sides.
It might be a childhood memory, she realized after hourless floating. Perhaps the door had surrounded her when she was smaller, but time had shifted her perception.
Time. She laughed into the faintly gritty water. How much time? How long had she been damned to the watery hell, already? How much longer would it be until she broke free?
It doesn't matter, the patient one whispered again. What matters is freedom. We'll be free soon.
She uncurled, angling toward the floor, to collect her hammer again. Stone chips lay scattered around the room, providing texture she reveled in. Small fingers lifted a sharp stone, and slid it across her cheek. The pain was thin, fading almost before she tasted the blood in the water. With a giggle, she let the piece go, and searched for her wedge.
Finding it, she pushed up again, feeling for the hole she drilled with mindless perseverance. She could fit her whole head in it now. Eventually she would break through to the other side. In time, she would break free.
In time, the patient one promised, there will be revenge.
6
Cathal Devane met them at the auditorium’s front door, bending to kiss Emma’s cheek before giving Lorhen a fond clap on the back. It was easy for him, Emma thought: charm came naturally to the big Irishman, more naturally than anything, perhaps, save swordfighting. Probably more naturally than that, though; he hadn’t been born with a sword in his hand. “If I’d known ye’s couldn’t bear to be without me for three weeks I’d have invited ye’s along in the first place.”
“He’s pulled out the ye’s,” Lorhen announced airily. “We must be in trouble. If he starts in with the faiths and the begorrahs, run.”
“Ah sure and we say ye’s even now so, but show me an Irish man or woman who after sayin’ faith and begorrah with even a wee little bit of sincerity in the past hundred and fifty years and I’ll eat me own hat,” Cathal said with all the flourish he could manage, and for good measure took a bow. Emma laughed, miming applause, and he gave her one of his broad, easy smiles. She’d been his Keeper for almost the whole of her career, and watching him daily hard largely inured her to his beauty. It always startled her to see him again after a break and to realize just how handsome he was. He wore dark brown hair shaggy, caught between fashions but making the most of light blue eyes and warm tones in his pale skin with a kind of artless vanity. He stood taller and broader than almost anyone of his generation should have—the Timeless often seemed to run tall and strong—and his features were so even and attractive that they looked like they’d been thought out beforehand. Lorhen’s sharp, narrow face looked like it could have—and may have, Emma thought sourly—inspired a Roman emperor’s bust; Cathal was the template for an Adonis.
Lorhen rolled his eyes and let Cathal hold the door for both of them, but stopped barely a handful of steps into the auditorium foyer to mutter, “I hate crowds. Are we late?”
Emma, under her breath, said, “Yes,” while Cathal said it more loudly. Lorhen glared at them both and Emma shrugged. “I told you we needed to be at the airport two hours early, Logan. It’s not my fault we missed the plane.”
“I thought you were being irritatingly militaristic,” Lorhen protested. “I remember when you could just walk in off the street and on to your plane without all this nonsense.”
“Logan, anybody who’s watched Die Hard remembers that, if they don't to begin with. At least we made it to the lecture.”
“Nearly,” Cathal said cheerfully into their bickering. “If we don’t get into the auditorium you’ll have flown eight hundred miles for the sake of my company.”
“And fine company it is,” Emma announced somewhat dourly before finishing with, “but let’s move.”
The lobby itself, despite Lorhen’s complaints, wasn’t too bad, but the auditorium doors led into a well-dressed cattle feed, gossips standing in the aisles while noisy students wrangled for seats and called to each other across the enormous room. Emma watched them for a moment, thinking how young they looked from her viewpoint as a mortal in her mid-fifties, and wondered if they all simply seemed impossibly unfinished to Lorhen and Cathal.
Lorhen edged his way around a small crowd of gossips and collapsed his ribs and shoulders inward, letting grey-haired dignitaries squish past him toward the stage but bumping into a woman behind him. She wobbled and yelped, and Lorhen, with a patently apologetic and utterly insincere smile, leaned forward again to let her pass. "Please tell me we have ticketed seats near an exit so we can escape easily."
“The University said it couldn’t be a ticketed event. The Keepers got us reserved seats in the first five rows, but they’re not assigned. We’ll need to find three together.” Emma pointed stage left, near the front of the auditorium. “Maybe down there. Go on, Lorhen, you’ve got long legs, make use of them.”
“Cathal’s two inches taller than I am.” Never-the-less, Lorhen stepped into one of the rows, then, expediently, started stepping over each row, angling for empty spaces where people had not yet seated themselves, and got ahead of the crowd.
“You two patching it up, then?” Cathal asked the moment Lorhen was out of earshot. Emma gave him a flat look and slipped into a space too small for Cathal to fit, then smiled at the man who begrudgingly let Cathal follow her. “Right, so,” Cathal breathed as he caught up. “Are you and I patching it up? I’ve barely seen you for months, Em, and I know you haven’t had me reassigned.”
“Do you.”
The confidence in Cathal’s smile faltered. “You wouldn’t. Not with as much as I know about the Keepers. You’d not compromise another Keeper’s identity, risk me figuring out who was watching me now.” He hesitated. “Would you?”
“I’ve known you—been friends with you—for almost five years, Cathal, and I’ve been working with Logan Adams for nearly a decade. I thought we were friends. All of us. I didn’t think my friends would keep a secret like that from me.”
“Says a woman whose job is to watch immortals commit murder and not tell anyone,” Cathal said very softly indeed. “Emma, it wasn’t my secret to tell, or I would have, and I truly d
on’t believe Lorhen knows how to stop keeping that secret. Even Lisse—she knows he’s Timeless, but she doesn’t know who he is.”
There was the faintest salve in Cathal’s argument. Lisse Rousseau was, in no particular order, a liar, a charmer, a cheat and a thief, a renowned beauty, twelve hundred years old and capable of retaining a child’s delight in finding and wallowing in trouble, and she had known Lorhen, under one name or another, for at least a century. Lorhen seemed genuinely fond of her, and she, unlike Emma, probably stood a reasonable chance of actually killing him for keeping secrets of that magnitude. She probably wouldn’t, but she might be able to. And if she didn’t, she could take centuries to get over being angry at him, a luxury Emma didn’t have. “He told you.”
“He wanted something from me.” Cathal gallantly offered his elbow to guide Emma through a group of college students, and although she took it, she also said, “I can navigate a crowd, Cathal.”
“I know, but far be it from me to fail to provide escort for a beautiful woman.”
Amusement pulled the corner of her mouth up and she ended up laughing and shaking her head. “You’re much more difficult to stay angry with than he is.”
“Well, you’re not as angry at me to begin with. He could have told you anything, you know, Em. He could have said he Awakened a few years ago and had been afraid to tell anyone. He didn't have to tell you he was Lorhen. Don't you think that says something?"
"That he is monumentally arrogant, and couldn't resist the chance to rub it in." Emma flared her nostrils and flattened her mouth at the sideways glance Cathal gave her. "Yes, all right, fine. Maybe he was looking for an excuse. That doesn't make it any damn easier, Devane."
"Fair enough. Would it make it easier if I told you he comes by and mopes about you not talking to him?"
Emma eyed the tall Irishman. "Does he?"