Simmons glanced at him. “You look ready to leave.”
“The consultant, the Einherjar. He’s a friend of mine.”
“I figured you knew each other. Strand sold your virtues heavily.”
“I haven’t seen him for years, sir. Would you mind?”
Simmons narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “It might be good to have someone on the inside with the Herleifr. Why don’t you go ahead and catch up with him? See where you end up. Report back as and when. Got a smartphone with a good ISD plan, Montgomery?”
“Yes, sir.”
Simmons pulled his own phone out of his pocket. “What’s your number?”
Lucas gave it to him. Simmons programmed the number into his contacts, then sent a text message to Lucas. Lucas felt his phone vibrate. “Got it, sir.”
Simmons shook his head as he put the phone away. “I never could understand why the Alfar couldn’t figure out how to tap into our phones and computers, given that they wrap the globe and they’re insecure as hell, but Strand nailed that one neatly. Their auras are just mystery and magic to us, too.” He straightened up. “Enjoy your catch up and keep your antenna up, Commander. From what I hear, you’re about to head into Wonderland.”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.” But Lucas was only partly telling the truth. Charlee’s stories, last year, when he had been sober enough to absorb them properly, had hinted at a world far different from the human one he knew.
Part of him was eager to find out.
* * * * *
Asher was fastening the last buckle on his leather armor when Lucas reached him. He looked around and gave Lucas a small smile. “I owe you a drink.”
“At least,” Lucas agreed. “What did you tell them about me?”
“The truth,” Asher said shortly, wrapping the belt around his waist again. He took back his sword from the MP who was patiently holding it for him and nodded his thanks. The MP saluted him and Asher raised his brows, surprised.
“It’s been officially decided that stallari is the equivalent to lieutenant, so you outrank him,” Lucas pointed out.
“We don’t salute,” Asher said shortly.
“We know that, too.” Lucas grinned. “You’ll notice he didn’t hold the salute until you returned it?”
Asher pushed the sword through the belt. Lucas could see that the loop that held the sword was reinforced with small metal plates, just like the breastplate he was wearing, which had rows of them stitched across the leather. “You guys haven’t got around to using sheaths to carry your swords?”
Asher picked up a metal helm off the bench beside him and tucked it under his arm. “In battle, you never put your sword away. Why wear a sheath that will bang the knees and risk being tripped up?”
It was more of the same pared-down thinking the rest of his armor and clothing demonstrated.
Asher looked around. “There was a car that brought me from the hall. I don’t suppose it waited.”
“There are taxis,” Lucas said. “We can get one at the base gates.”
“Then let’s get that drink.”
* * * * *
The Vajenny hall was the first Kine hall Lucas had ever seen. It was hidden behind a church with onion towers painted green, and they walked through the nave to reach the entrance, which was through a narrow and unremarkable door that might have been mistaken for a closet door by unsuspecting people.
“Are all the halls hidden like this?” Lucas asked curiously as Asher shut the door behind them.
“They’re all hidden, but in different ways. We used the local environment and went from there.”
The room they were in was perfectly ordinary, but there were two Einherjar guarding the arch at the other end. “Ruben. Otto,” Asher murmured and led Lucas through the arch.
“I guess you guys all know each other,” Lucas said.
“I know most of the faces, but I don’t know everyone by name. I just happen to know these two.” He lifted his chin, looking across the room they were in. “I don’t know those two.”
The room was big. Gymnasium big. The floor was raw floorboards, wide and dark with age and use. Dust lifted around his boots as Asher crossed the boards and somewhere overhead, Lucas heard the flap of a bird’s wings as they were ruffled. “This is one of the empty halls?”
Asher nodded at the two guards. They were standing on either side of a very ordinary-looking door, except that Lucas couldn’t see through the door. There was light on the other side that, while it wasn’t dazzling, masked whatever was there. “That’s a portal?” he asked.
“That’s a portal,” Asher agreed. “Put your hand on my shoulder. You can’t go through unless you’re touching me.”
Lucas raised his hand to Asher’s shoulder. The metal plates attached to the leather armor shifted under his fingers. Asher patted his fingers. “Squeeze, and hold on.”
He squeezed.
Asher stepped through the misty light, pulling Lucas with him. Lucas found he was holding his breath as he stepped through himself. There was a tugging sensation, brief and mild. Then, as if he had simply stepped through a doorway, Lucas found himself on the other side, finishing the step he had started somewhere else in the world.
He looked behind him. The same colorless, dense mist hid what was behind him. The doorframe was carved and decorated. There was another one right next to it, and a third beyond that. More guards were standing on either side.
Lucas spotted pale cream and brown marble on the floors, the walls and a roof that soared up…and up. Then Asher was greeting one of the guards, pulling his attention back to the portals.
“Frank!” Asher said. “Ciao. E ‘stato un po’!” They gripped each other’s wrists, and Lucas remembered with a start the way Asher had taught him to shake hands, long ago. The warriors’ handshake, he’d called it. This was the same grip.
Frank said something back, too fast for Lucas to pick up, then stood to one side for Asher to pass through. Asher glanced at him and Lucas gripped his shoulder again, quickly, as Asher stepped through the door, pulling him through...
...and out the other side.
This hall was even bigger than the last one and there were people everywhere. It reminded Lucas of the original Penn Station in size and echoing feeling, and in how busy it was. There were even blazing streams of sunlight falling from the windows high, high up near the vaulted ceiling, dolloping dazzling pools of light on the floor. This hall was round.
“Where is this?” Lucas asked. “Where was the last one?”
“The last hall was Rome,” Asher said, tugging at his armor and straightening his wrist guards. “This is the main foyer of the Second Hall.”
“There’s a First Hall?” Lucas asked, hearing the capital letters in the way Asher stressed the name.
“There was. Valhalla was lost to us.”
“So this is the capital...hall?”
“That’s a way of thinking of it,” Asher agreed. “The Regin and Annarr live and work here.”
They were two names Lucas remembered from Charlee’s run down of the Kine world. “They’re your king and queen, right?”
“More or less. But don’t call them that. Those are human titles. Call them the Second and Council, if you can’t remember the proper titles.”
He was heading across the round hall, weaving between people, and Lucas hurried to follow. “So where is ‘here’?” he asked. He twisted his head and looked around like a tourist. He didn’t care what he looked like. The scale and beauty of the hall was taking up all of his attention. So were the people. Were they all Kine? No, some of them would be Amica, like Charlee. But which ones? The women all looked stunningly beautiful.
But there were also some people in the crowd that were clearly human, for their garments were human and looked odd in this place. Every person that Lucas identified as human also had a Kine companion.
On the other side of the round hall was another bank of portals, and people were stepping into and out of them like comm
uters passing through ticket barriers at the train station. There were guards posted at every portal, not standing to one side, but standing in front of them, checking everyone who came through.
“Here isn’t something you need to know just now,” Asher said. “It’s a security thing. You understand, right?” He glanced over his shoulder at him.
Lucas nodded. “You’re keeping your Whitehouse under wraps, just in case.”
Asher grinned. “Good analogy.”
Lucas could tell from the direction he was taking that he wasn’t heading for the opposite portals. “Where are we going?”
“You’ll see,” Asher replied.
There were a pair of doors ahead. Huge things. There were people moving in and out through the one door that was open, and he estimated the height of the doors by the size of the people passing through and whistled silently. The doors were nearly eighty feet high! That meant they were each about twenty feet across, at least.
They passed through the doors into a room that Lucas sensed was the actual hall in this structure, the area where the Regin and Annarr would appear. He could spot between the heads of people in front of him a high dais with broad steps leading up to it at the other end of the room, which seemed to confirm his guess.
But the hall was not a royal reception area right now. Lucas took in the folding privacy panels, the chairs and beds he could see peeking past the ends, and the flow of people through and around the panels. There were women pushing steel trolleys, all wearing dresses that came down to their ankles, or even longer, with white collarless shirts underneath. They all seemed to have long hair, tied up in a variety of ways. There were men sitting in chairs that ran down the middle of the hall, back to back. Many of them were wounded, but not seriously enough, it seemed, to need a bed straight away. All of the wounded were holding white cloths or pads to their wounds. It reminded him sharply of any ER in any big hospital, but the scale of this one matched the size of the room. There were five rows of cubicles, running the length of the hall. “I’ll be goddamned,” he muttered. “I guess you guys bleed after all.”
“We’re treating humans, too,” Asher said, again speaking over his shoulder. He was threading his way through the more slowly moving traffic in the hall, and Lucas kept up with him with effort. For such a big guy, he moved fast. He strode down the length of the waiting area past soldiers in uniforms that Lucas recognized. Humans, then. There were also more than a few Einherjar, recognizable because of the lack of a uniform and a heavy emphasis on leather armor and old-fashioned weapons.
The hall was filled with a steady, low hum that was the sum of murmurs, talking, even moans of pain. But there was no hysteria, or rush to deal with emergencies. The calmness and sense of control was quite different from an ER. The atmosphere of assurance was almost relaxing. Lucas felt like he had stepped into a placid, warm pool. He could feel the tension running out of his shoulders and chest. He was absurdly glad to be here.
Even the wounded seemed to be happy.
Asher’s stride checked, then he halted and Lucas almost bowled him over. Asher lifted his chin, indicating one of the cubicles on the left.
The cubicles weren’t cubes at all, Lucas realized. They were triangular, so that the row behind this one slotted into the space left by the pair on either side. The panel facing the outside was shorter than the other two, making an opening that served as the door. The bed inside was a fold-up, roll-away contraption sitting next to the internal wall. It meant that the head of the patient was visible through the opening, but nothing else. It also meant the patient could see out, too. In fact some of the soldiers waiting in the chairs were talking to others in cubicles along the rows. There was no segregation of wounded from healthy. They were all in it together.
There was a woman treating the patient on this bed. Lucas could just see her arm, tugging a sheet into place over the man’s chest. Then she stepped fully in to view.
“Charlee!” His surprise pushed her name from his lips.
She turned, and her eyes widened and her lips parted. Then she held up her hand, a finger raised either in warning, or a request to give her moment. She bent over the patient and spoke to him, and he grinned and nodded.
Charlee stepped out of the ‘room’ and moved over to them. Her gaze moved to Asher, then came back to Lucas. She hugged him and Lucas held her tightly. He was stupidly glad to see her. “God, you look so great!” he said. “Even wearing that funny dress.”
She smiled at him. Her hair was tied back in a simple plait that hung down the middle of her back. The dress swept the floor, but it hugged her waist and hips and Lucas, although he preferred a woman in a mini-skirt and high heels, thought she looked sexy in a way that he’d never considered before. He glanced at Asher, to see if he appreciated her appearance, then looked away quickly, for there was a naked, almost embarrassing hunger in his expression as he stared at her.
“How long is it since you two saw each other?” Lucas asked suspiciously.
Charlee pulled her gaze back to Lucas. “Over a year,” she said quietly.
“What the fuck?” he muttered, distress making his heart thud. “I thought you…I thought you two…Fuck!” he added, angry at the swirl of disillusionment swirling through him. He hated this sort of hard emotional crap and the way it made him feel. “All this time, I figured you were together,” he finished bluntly. He looked at Asher. “You said you would take care of her.”
“I am,” Asher said flatly.
“He does,” Charlee confirmed.
“By not seeing you for a year?”
She lifted her hands, taking in the whole room. “I am safer here than anywhere else on Earth.”
Lucas blew out his breath and deliberately sought to change the subject. “So, what are you? Some sort of doctor?”
“You’re working on your own,” Asher added. “Eira is too busy?”
She answered both of them. “I seem to have a knack for it. Eira waved me away one morning and told me to go find someone to take care of. I’ve been doing it ever since.” Charlee gave a small smile. “For the badly injured, I call for a Valkyrie, but there are so many wounded and so few Valkyrie….” She shrugged. “I mostly do it myself.”
Eira. That was another name Lucas remembered from his long night drinking sack mead. He couldn’t remember exactly, but he thought she was someone high up. Possibly the Regin herself. And Charlee worked for her?
“You look tired,” Asher told her, beating Lucas to it.
“I am tired,” Charlee confessed. “The Ganxiao battle brought a wave of wounded here. We’re just getting on top of the rush now.”
Lucas looked around. “Rush” was the last word he would have used to describe the tranquil atmosphere. He saw that Asher was looking at him.
“They’re very good at this,” Asher said, with a small smile of his own.
“I’m picking that up.” He looked around again. “I suspect there is a lot you could teach western medicine.”
“We’ve stolen ideas from human medicine here and there. It would be nice to give back, one day,” Charlee said. Her smile was impish. “It’s so good to see you. Both of you. But I must keep going. There are still people waiting.”
Asher nodded. “We were passing through. I thought you might like to see Lucas. Count his teeth, fingers and toes and assure yourself he’s fine, before I pull him back to New York.”
“And I appreciate it enormously.” She picked up Lucas’ hand. “I’m always here in the Second Hall,” she told him. “Try to come back for a longer visit.”
He squeezed her hand. “I will,” he promised, although he had no idea how he would make that happen. “If someone walks me through the portals, I could come back the next time I’m off duty.”
“Go to the nearest hall,” Charlee told him. “Give them my name and location. They’ll bring you through.”
“What if the nearest hall is an empty one?” Lucas asked.
“All the portals are guarded, these da
ys,” Asher assured him. He glanced at Charlee. “It was good to see you,” he said softly.
She smiled at him. “Yes, it was.” But there was a note in her voice and a light in her eyes that disputed that.
Was it misery? Lucas clenched his fists at the thought. “Time for that drink,” he declared.
“Yes, it is,” Asher said flatly. But the same misery was reflected in his eyes.
Lucas kissed Charlee on the cheek. “Go back to work,” he told her. “You’re needed.”
She hurried away, down the length of the chairs toward the big dais, calling out to another woman in a similar dress, who began to push one of the trolleys toward her.
“God, she’s so…” Lucas began, hunting for a single word that would encompass the air of competency that surrounded her. It was like nothing would ever surprise her, as if she’d seen so much of the world and everything in it.
“Yes, she is,” Asher agreed and began to walk in the other direction.
They were out into the circular hall before Lucas could formulate his next question in a way that wouldn’t embarrass him to ask it, or that Asher would find too nosy. “What happened with you two? I never liked the idea of you and Charlee, but that’s because it looked so inevitable.”
Asher didn’t answer straight away. He picked up Lucas’ hand and slapped it onto his shoulder, the plates and their studs digging into Lucas’ flesh, then stepped through one of the portals, pulling him through.
Lucas looked around at the wooden walls, the fire in the center of the floor, the gritty tiles underfoot. The scale of this hall was much smaller and more intimate. It even felt friendly. “Where is this?”
“Pearl Street,” Asher said.
“New York?” Lucas shook his head. “I had no idea this place existed and I grew up here.”
“That was the general idea,” Asher told him. He was unbuckling his sword belt and tugging at the buckles on the sides of his armor. “I have an office here and a locker to park my gear. Give me five minutes, then there’s a little bar just around the corner—you probably don’t know about that place, either. I’ll introduce you to the barman, Eric. And I’ll introduce you to mead.”
The Branded Rose Prophecy Page 52