Taco the Third.
“So,” she asked, “where would you like to begin?”
I played dumb. “About?”
“Disobeying my orders? Knocking out Jason? Subverting Estefan? Risking Valentine’s life? Disappearing into a hole in the ground? Appearing in Seattle? Fighting the Curator? Almost dying how many times?” she listed.
“I got Val to fall in love with me though, so it was totally worth it,” I pointed out.
Ceinwyn went silent.
She used it as a weapon to make me feel guilty about keeping everything from her. I did feel guilty, that was the thing. I should trust her. It was just . . . everything Paine hinted at. Or split pooling? Or extended pooling? And all the Meteyos and Geo Realm stuff . . .
How much of it was Ceinwyn being in the dark?
How much of it was Ceinwyn lying to me?
Would Ceinwyn Dale, the Last True Dale, the Head of Recruiting, really be that in the dark about there being other . . . dimensions?
There hadn’t been a lot of time to think about what I’d learned and what I’d been told in the past week. But already the ramifications seemed . . . really bad. It cast a huge pall on what I’d learned about the Mancy at the Asylum. About what the teachers taught us. I thought they held some secrets back . . . dangerous tricks, especially deadly conjurations, stuff like that.
But this . . .
Okay, not telling us about extended pools and split pooling . . . I got that. Don’t want even the Ultras playing around with really powerful stuff until they’re older. Ceinwyn’s always talking about when I’m older, she’ll tell me. So eventually we’d be told. That sucked, but it was fair.
Mancy knows how many people in this world are fucktards, mancers included.
But this?
It all smelled of conspiracy and deceit and treachery.
Plus . . .
Only a fool steals some of the truth and then gives it away.
That’s how you end up in prison.
Don’t think the mancers have a prison? We do. Guild of Artificers runs it.
They say you can’t use the Mancy inside of it, like one big Holding Room.
“I had to do it for Christmas,” I finally said, “kid’s kind of a brat, but she didn’t deserve that.”
“And what would have happened to her?”
Time to lie with the truth. “Curator’s an Artificer and I think he’s got his own asylum, that he’s draining mancers your Recruiters miss.”
Ceinwyn paled. She was actually scared by the thought. Or did she guess at who the Curator was? Good ol’ Obadiah Paine, still alive even though she dropped a boulder on him? If she did, she didn’t say anything about it. “What can you tell me about him?”
My don’t-give-a-crap shrug. “Beats me. Had some nice toys. He had armor on so you couldn’t see him well.” Only parts of him and you could see his face, but this was a good lie to cover the secret.
“Armor?”
“Titanium? Steel? Clank, clank, wherever he went.”
“Anything else?”
“Had a guy called Conan with him doing the kidnappings, was a corpusmancer.”
Ceinwyn nodded. “Valentine told us . . . Conan Sapa. He was a student here. He joined the armed forces, special corpusmancer division. Left four years ago, became a freelance mercenary, then completely disappeared last year.”
“Rounding up little kids for the Curator’s museum.”
The pale faded from Ceinwyn, an anger instead overtaking her, coloring her cheeks with heat. “So it’s believed.”
“Gonna kill him one day. Both of them.”
Ceinwyn studied me. “Leave them to me . . . and to ESLED. You keep working with your Artifacts.”
“You’re the one who threw Annie at me,” I accused, “you started it all.”
“A small taste of the bigger world so you could defend yourself,” she scoffed at how the best laid plans of mice and men had worked out, “yet you keep digging the hole deeper and deeper!”
“I’m a geomancer . . . I like holes.”
Taco the Fourth.
“Speaking of which,” Ceinwyn hedged.
“Yeah, yeah. I don’t have a clue what happened.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Really? After knowing me for so long?”
She nodded at a point well scored. “I guess history does back you up as a bumbling buffoon.”
“Hey now, I might be a fuck up, but I have feelings.”
“As I’ve told you before, fairies are very dangerous,” Ceinwyn said, “their deals might seem simple and valuable to you, and I know the hydro-anima concentrate helped us the one time . . . but don’t go looking for them.”
“I just wanted to know where the Curator was taking Christmas; I didn’t expect to end up where I did.” See, it’s easy to lie with the truth. “Or that it would save me from the Curator after we fought.”
“It pulled you out?”
“We’re kind of friends, I guess. I don’t know . . . I don’t get it.”
“Stay away from fairies,” she repeated.
He’s not a fairy. He’s a dragon, I thought, but didn’t say out loud.
“Is that it? The end of the grilling?”
I don’t think she bought it all, but she bought enough of it that she knew she had to eat the tacked on warranty cost and the taxes and the surcharges. Fucking civilization . . . got to eat the taxes. Don’t eat the taxes and it all falls down.
Guys like the Curator end up in charge.
Or King Henry Price.
Eventually, Ceinwyn nodded. “The Lady wants a written statement before you leave the school and ESLED wants you to sit down with a facial reconstruction artist to see if you can give us our first survivor’s picture of the Curator.”
I nodded too, but like a man who had dodged a bullet. “Why not do some mentimancer mojo on me?”
Ceinwyn scowled. “No one trusts mentimancers, you know that.”
I do.
It makes me very happy.
A world that trusts mentimancers is a world without bullshit.
I love me some bullshit.
It’s my natural habitat.
I bagged my food wrappers, hers too. “See ya then.”
Ceinwyn seemed put off by the sudden dismissal. “No Auntie Badass time?”
“Nope, sorry,” I told her, “now if you’ll excuse me, I need to return to having copious and probably unhealthy amounts of sex with my new girlfriend.”
Session 41
Some days I think boredom will be the death of me.
Not my mouth. Not my fists. Not even Prince Henry wanting to put himself in some crazy chick’s spicy muff taco. Just my beautiful mind.
Okay, ain’t a whole lot beautiful about my mind.
My ugly, foul-mouthed, often perverted, one-of-a-kind mind.
Better?
Gonna get me killed one day. Boredom and curiosity gonna come together for some hate sex and there goes King Henry Price, his mortal coil snapping with the rest of him.
Stupid fucker tried to slide down the side of the Mound . . . in the summer.
I’m a geomancer, he thinks, I could do it.
Ain’t no one around to stop me, he thinks some more.
And that’s the problem.
Ain’t no one around.
Asylum’s a graveyard during August. One day we were all graduating as Quads with the rest of Class ’09. Happy day, partying all night. Then . . . next day every single one of my friends and enemies and everyone . . . every single one of them are gone to spend time with their families. Even Jason and Jesus, my two buddies in solitary, bailed on me this year. Jason with Welf and Jesus to spend a month with Pocket in Pismo Beach.
Pocket offered me a spot too, but the Lady turned it down.
Guess she’s still not over the whole stolen staff thing. Or the Got-My-Whole-Class-Thrown-in-the-Holding-Room thing.
My Mom had just died.
I was grieving!
That makes breaking Welf’s arm forgivable.
It’s his fault for having such a frozen twat of a girlfriend anyway.
But back on subject.
Can’t get distracted from this prime storytelling material here, can we, kiddos?
King Henry Price, sitting on his favorite bench of the Mound, all alone, now a Proud and Learned Graduate of the Institution of Elements, Learning Academy and Nature Camp. King Henry Price, his ass collecting splinters as he thinks: I could fucking do it, I could fucking sled down the Mound right now.
Didn’t know how to feel about being Proud and Learned and all that official shit. Four years gone. Three years to go. The real training ahead of me. Not geomancer, but Artificer. Finally get to meet this Plutarch asshole. Finally get to make some artifacts.
If I survived the next month of boredom.
Could fucking take a sled down the Mound right now! Would just have to watch out for the trees . . .
Luckily for me, for the Asylum, and probably for history itself, someone happened along to save me from myself.
From my boredom.
From my curiosity.
From my ugly, foul-mouthed, often perverted, one-of-a-kind mind.
Ceinwyn Dale.
Just like that first time in Fresno.
Ceinwyn Dale . . . she’s always saving me.
[CLICK]
August 2013
I noticed her approach long before she arrived.
It’s not just the students that go AWOL from the Asylum in August, it’s all the teachers and staff as well. Only vacation time they get all year long, so of course they run off at the first opportunity. Jethro Smith’s band, The Madness, had a month of gigs in every skuzzy, hole-in-the-wall dive that would take them. The Gullicks headed out to see Yellowstone and Mt. Rushmore. Russell Quilt took his main squeeze Audrey Foster on a romantic Tahitian getaway—Miss Foster didn’t know it, but Quilt planned on proposing while she was all randy from the boy-toy islanders being about.
I already forced Quilt to let me plan the bachelor party.
Which I think says something about his lack of judgment.
Don’t think I can get strippers on the Asylum grounds, do you, Quilt? We’ll just see about that!
So even the ‘adults’ had emptied out of the place.
It was a ghost town, not a soul on the Field, not a blip of music carrying from the Hall, not a single basketball being bounced on the Gym’s hardwood floors. Silence but for the swaying of trees and the chirping of birds, the air of mountain summer pleasingly warm without making you sweat.
A fellow could have relaxed nicely into that silence.
Except for curiosity.
I could take a sled down the Mound, yeah I could, just need to steal a camera so everyone believes me when they get back . . .
But then a flash of blond hair on the Field.
I perked up, thoughts immediately flying to Valentine even though deep down I knew she was back home in San Francisco. We broke up again . . . Fuck Up Number Two on my part, and I still wasn’t over it. How the hell can that woman be begging me to slide it inside her one day and slapping away my hands like they might make us explode the next?
Wasn’t even any other girls around to distract me with a new chase.
Just me.
King Henry Price.
He of the ugly, foul-mouthed, often perverted, one-of-a-kind mind
Alone.
And that blond walking towards him.
Not Val. Not sunshine blond, but the color of faded yellow. Go further and you’d arrive at Hope Hunting’s full-on platinum hair, but this was in the middle of the two. It’d been a few months since I’d seen the shade, but realization finally hit me.
It’s Ceinwyn.
But she’s supposed to be recruiting.
A pit formed in my stomach. Last time Ceinwyn had appeared like this Mom had died. Had something happened to Dad?
Not that I gave a shit.
That’s what I told myself. Whipped me with a belt all those times, why should I care if he’s gone? Drove off JoJo. Couldn’t save Mom. Doesn’t understand a thing about the Mancy. Why should I give a shit about him?
Cuz he worked to keep food on the table and then cooked the food to put it in your belly even on the days when Mom couldn’t drag herself out of bed. Cuz you didn’t have much, but you did have health insurance and shots and a cast when you broke you arm that one time. Cuz Susan got braces and JoJo had her appendix taken out and . . .
Ceinwyn took her sweet time walking up the incline of the Mound to my favorite bench.
I watched every step like she was the Grim Reaper.
She smiled on finding me. “There you are, King Henry.”
She was smiling. Ceinwyn always smiled except when she didn’t and when she didn’t . . . she hadn’t been smiling when she told me about Mom.
I relaxed. Not bad news then. Not the Reaper’s scythe, just a Dale’s smile. “What up, Auntie Badass?”
“Couldn’t you have come up with a more proper nickname for me?”
“Wonder Woman was already taken,” I majorly sucked up.
Her smile brightened as she stood there, studying me like I was some new undiscovered species. She didn’t bother to sit down on the bench. Her posture said she needed to be places yesterday, not an uncommon one with Ceinwyn Dale. Guess it was just a quick check in on her most troublesome recruit. See if he metamorphosed yet. Why’s that butterfly’s markings look like penises?
“You missed graduation.”
“I was on a plane returning from Russia,” she explained like I was an adult—which technically I was now—but she would have done it before, “the St. Petersburg Worker’s Council of United Elementalism needed a polite reminder that their recruiters shouldn’t stray outside of the former Soviet Bloc nations.”
“Well,” I said innocently, “somehow Val won First in the Year.”
“You were second and Mister Welf was third,” Ceinwyn accused, like I’d somehow caused this outcome.
I totally had caused this outcome, but they couldn’t prove it. That’s what counts. No proof. “He looked like he was about to be tortured during the whole ceremony,” I said like I wasn’t quite sure if this pleased me or not. Welf was still a pompous ass, but he was my pompous ass after four years of living in the same room with him.
“His parents expect the best out of him,” was all Ceinwyn said, adding, “he has a great lineage to live up to.”
“Like you? I hear rumors.”
She rolled her eyes, chiding me with, “Only believe half of them.”
“Which half?”
Ceinwyn’s smile went coy. “And give up my air of mystery?”
I fidgeted into some silence.
Ceinwyn still wanted to be elsewhere, but even at her most Auntie Badass she wasn’t cold enough to tell me to ‘fuck off’ after only a five minute check in.
“Not that I don’t mind the company given that I’m bored out of my mind,” I tried to help her, “but ain’t you like busy or something? Recruits to see and all that shit before the school year?”
“Yes,” she agreed, still studying me . . . caterpillar or butterfly? “I’m very busy.”
More uncomfortable silence.
“Don’t let me keep you,” I told her, all affronted, “I’m busy too, ya know.”
“Oh?”
“Thinking about taking a sled down the Mound.”
“It’s August . . .” she deadpanned.
“So?”
“You need snow, or at least a team of cryomancers.”
“That’s defeatist talk, Miss Dale.”
More studying. Still no leaving. Butterfly alright . . . but those penis markings . . . not trustworthy. Wonder if it’s venomous?
“Are you about to expel me? I promise I didn’t do it.”
Her smile almost curved in upon itself, full Cheshire Cat mode. “Do what?”
“Fill Welf’s suitcases with girl’s underwear.
”
Ceinwyn gave me one of her barking laughs as a reward for the mental image. “I’m sure he’ll enjoy explaining that to his butler.”
“He has a butler?”
“As you’re well aware: the Welfs are still in the nineteenth century. Victoria also has a lady’s maid. Welf Manor has stables and hunting grounds and garden paths. It’s like walking backwards in time.”
“Welf Manor and a butler . . . worst Batman ever. Excuse me, evil doer, but I am the Batman and this is my big black friend Jason, he shall beat on you while I majestically watch the action with a superior air.”
“Someone’s been stealing from Russell’s comic book collection again,” she teased me.
I shrugged. “He’s not using it.”
“Yes . . . Tahiti . . . with Foster . . .” Ceinwyn said through clenched teeth.
“You lost the battle, Miss Dale, he’s gonna propose.”
More silence, Ceinwyn bouncing on her feet, me tapping my hands on the bench. “If I’m not being expelled . . .” I led.
“A sled?” she asked again.
I shrugged some more. “Nothing better to do.”
“Are you sure?” she asked.
“The Lady has it out for me,” I complained, so deep in my self-pity I completely missed her hint, “I could be in Pismo Beach right now. I don’t know why I’d want to be in Pismo Beach, but Pocket says there are bikinis and co-eds and I approve of both bikinis and co-eds, especially when they go together. Especially when I’m taking the bikinis off of the co-eds . . .”
I had a little five-second fantasy worthy of at least Cinemax if not Brazzers.
Ceinwyn snapped me out of it by tapping on my forehead with a slim finger.
“What?”
“Are you sure?” she repeated.
“Wait . . . what?”
She waved at me mockingly. “The genius who engineered the top three spots of his graduating class going exactly where he wanted them to, stare in wonder at his razor sharp mind.”
“Don’t give me false hope, Miss Dale, that’s cruel even for you,” I whined. Yes, whined. I was desperate for any port in the storm.
She waved again, this time down the Mound. “Follow and witness my wonders.”
Please, I prayed to Fate, the Bitch-Queen of Many Buggerings, please don’t fuck me this time. You can fuck me double later, just don’t fuck me now. Anything but a month alone on this bench, anything!
The Foul Mouth and the Headless Hunny (The King Henry Tapes) Page 3