—Aristotle
When it comes to throwing a fit, it's better to give than to receive—and much the best to avoid the whole thing entirely.
—Walter Slovotsky
The air in the thatch hut was cool and quiet; the killing had been over a long time. But it didn't feel that way. It hadn't felt that way before, and it didn't now.
"Ta havath, Jason," the dwarf said. Literally, it was the verb to maintain in Erendra, but it meant take it easy. Relax. Don't get excited. "It happened a long time ago." His voice was quiet, but rasping, the sound of an old saw, still sharp.
"Too long," Jason Cullinane said, bending to feel at the rotting straw covering the floor. Soggy, more than half-rotted, it had not been changed in many tendays.
The shack was dark, and quiet, and no longer reeked of death, as though it never had. If anything, it smelled too good. The damp, musty reek of the thatch overhead, the fresh wind blowing in the open door and out through the torn greased paper that had covered the window, and the cool smells of the forest all combined with the rotting straw in a way that was disturbingly pleasant.
It should have smelled of death.
An old man and an old woman had been killed here, murdered here.
By my best friend, he thought. Mikyn . . .
Enough. Straightening, he turned to the dwarf. Ahira's easy good humor hadn't deserted him, not even here and now as he stood where morning sunlight splashed golden on the rotting straw. There was nothing of a broad smile on his face, but just a trace peeked through his black beard. It held something of reassurance in it, perhaps, and perhaps more than something of an announcement, perhaps something of a warning.
It said, I have dealt with worse than this, and this too I will deal with.
Jason envied his self-assurance.
"There's nothing more we can do here," Ahira said.
"More?"
Ahira's laugh might have been forced, or perhaps not. It was hard to tell, "Nothing, then."
They exited into the too-bright sunlight. Nareen was waiting out there, floating comfortably in the air above the three battered rucksacks. The wind kept the grasses waving gently, like the Cirric on a quiet day, but it didn't appear to affect Nareen. Little did.
His appearance was exceptional for a dwarf. While he had the large bones and even larger joints of his breed, Nareen lacked the huge bundles of muscle that generally wrapped around a dwarf's bones. His skin hung on him loosely, as though he was somehow deflated. Instead of the gentle rounding that softened the harsh bones of Ahira's face into something warm and familiar, Nareen's cheekbones and eye ridges kept his look almost skeletal. It was like having a skull looking out at you, and Jason didn't like it much at all.
"There is, I take it, no sign of your friend?"
Jason shook his head. "None." He had hoped to find some trace of Mikyn, something he had left behind, something that Nareen could use to trace him, but it had been unlikely, and it was too much to ask. But maybe, just maybe.
He had the beginning of an idea, but it was one that scared him silly. It probably required more cleverness, or more fighting skills, than he would ever have. But it made sense, at least on one level, and it was the sort of thing that Walter Slovotsky would think of.
Purely logical: who else was looking for Mikyn? The Slavers Guild was, and they were based in Pandathaway. That might be the place to find out where Mikyn was—although it was also a place where Jason and Ahira were wanted, dead or alive. It would take much trickiness to get in and out alive. More of a Walter Slovotsky thing than a Jason Cullinane thing.
Leave it be, for the time being.
3
In Which I Hurt Myself for Good Reason,
and Play with Knives
Perhaps the reward of the spirit who tries is not the goal but the exercise.
—E. V. Cooke
Well, truth to tell, my first thought after we arrived on This Side wasn't Holy shit—I'll never have to do a fucking calisthenic again. It was, however, my second thought. (I was wrong, but there you have it.)
—Walter Slovotsky
I never really wanted to be a football player, but my scholarship was a way for me to go to college without sucking Stash and Emma's savings dry. They'd put aside money for it, sure, but Other Side colleges are like the vampires that leaked out of Faerie during the Leak: how much of your money they soak up isn't a variable—they take all of it. That's the way the system is structured.
There are a few situations where some of that weight will be taken off you. It happened to some of us. Lou Riccetti got a thousand bucks a year off of his tuition for being a National Merit Finalist (never mind what that means; it's a long story). I never asked James Michael what sort of deal he got, although I know there was one.
Me, I got a completely free ride for being very adept at running after and seizing a fast-running man holding an inflated pig-leather bladder, and then quickly throwing him to the ground. In order to maintain that facility, I had to spend a lot of time with sweaty people of varying intelligence, all of whom were obsessed with the movement of that leather bladder, and with training for their opportunity either to move it or to prevent somebody else from moving it. I dunno, but it seemed reasonable to me. At the time.
* * *
By the time I had reached a hundred sit-ups, my abdominal muscles were screaming for mercy, so I decided to inflict only another fifty on them.
The trick is to persuade yourself that every bit of pain is helping make things better, and for all I know that can be true about a lot of things.
That which does not kill me makes me stronger, and all.
Or maybe it just hurts. I don't know.
Dressed in a pair of drawstring shorts and a loose shirt, I was stretched out on a woven grass mat in the fencing studio near the window at the juncture of floor and ceiling. The early morning sunlight had warmed the mat to merely chilled, which I could live with, and it made the wicker walls look all cozy and golden, which I could enjoy.
"Whatcha doing, Daddy?" came from the entrance to the fencing studio, in a high-pitched voice that still didn't have a full grasp of complex consonants. My baby daughter, Doria Andrea.
Well, at least that was better than the time that Janie had walked in on Kirah and me making love, and said the same thing, followed somewhat later by, "If you were having so much fun, why aren't you smiling?"
My daughters seem to catch me off guard when I'm sweaty; I was grateful this time it was only from exercise.
She was in a sort of shorts-based overall today, over a dingy white pullover sweater with the arms rolled up. I bet that even the dingy whiteness wouldn't last until lunch; my daughters always play hard, and there was a new coal-black foal in the stable that Doranne was helping the stable boy take care of, help that probably only slowed him down a medium amount. Which, too, was okay.
"Hi, Doranne," I said, sitting up to give her a hug. Attention fathers: enjoy the hugs while you can; eventually they get too old for that, or at least think they're too old. "I'm staving off eternity, one bit of agony at a time."
She frowned, but then put the frown away. When you're four, adults are always saying things that you don't understand, but if you let them know that, then they'll always say, "You'll understand when you're older."
Except me. I never say that to my kids.
"I don't understand," she finally said.
"What I meant to say is that I'm exercising, trying to keep myself strong and pretty. What's up?"
She didn't get that, but she decided that it didn't bother her. Which also was okay.
"Uncle Bren said to tell you he wanted to see you," she said.
Which wasn't okay. And which also wasn't her fault. "Thanks, honey," I said. "Did he say where he'd be?"
She shook her head. "I din't ask. I'm sorry."
"T'sokay, kidlet," I said. "You seen Auntie Andy this morning?"
She nodded. "I helped her saddle her horse; she went for a ride."
W
ell, that was good. By far, the best intermediate training in riding consists of riding a lot, and I had prescribed long, hard morning rides for Andy, switching horses out at the farm, and then again at one of the nearer villages. It would be good for her seat—technical term—and I couldn't help thinking what it was doing for her thighs, then mentally slapped myself. Life was complicated enough.
My daughter shifted from foot to foot.
"What is it?"
"Dier said that if I went to the stables early enough, I could feed the new baby horse."
"Then you'd better get going," I said, giving her a quick squeeze before I let her go. "I'll go find the baron."
She left at a dead run. Kids always run, and think nothing of it.
In the corner of the room, right over the sump-drain, was a cold-shower stall. I tossed off my exercise clothes, unstrapped the scabbard from my right calf, then quickly sluiced myself off in the cold water, fed from the cistern on the roof. Rainwater's good for the hair, so I'm told, but it was cold enough to make my testicles try and crawl back up inside my body cavity.
I dried myself with a thick but napless towel.
Time to get dressed. I was breaking in a new pair of black leather trousers, so I slipped those on, and tucked in the tails of an all-too-white silk shirt before belting it tightly around my waist.
The back of the matching leather vest held one throwing knife; the other one returned to its usual spot strapped to my calf. I slipped a Therranji garrote into a hidden pocket at the inside of my vest, then belted on my weapons belt, sword on the left, its hilt properly canted forward, a single pistol on the right.
Not quite what I'd prefer to take with me to have a talk with my wife's lover, but then again, I wasn't particularly expecting violence. Frankly, I was willing to bet against it. I didn't know whether or not I could have taken Bren in a fair fight, but it would have been a stupid gamble for either of us. Having his blood on my hands was unlikely to make me popular with my soon-to-be-ex-wife, or with any of the other women around—forgetting what the Emperor would probably say about me killing his favorite Holtish baron. And there are people who wouldn't have taken kindly to him killing me, probably including Kirah.
There are, after all, an amazing number of problems in the world that can't be fixed by slitting the right throat.
I loosened my sword in its sheath and headed out into the day.
* * *
The three musketeers caught up with me in the courtyard of the main keep, just outside of the back entrance to the kitchens, right where the cooks were growing yet another patch of dragonbane. (Well, with all the strange things that had been leaching out of Faerie, I didn't have a lot of trouble seeing why the cultivation of the stuff was becoming popular again. It's poisonous to most of the magical metabolisms.)
Well, not really the three musketeers. Which is just as well. Shit, imagine actually having Athos, Porthos, and Aramis at your back in a fight. By the time they'd finished speechifying, and then elegantly drawing their swords, and then preparing to fence—each in a style designed to reveal the nature of his character—three tired, ordinary swordsmen would have been looking down at their dead, bleeding bodies, breathing through their mouths to avoid the stink in the air, and wondering why life couldn't always be this easy.
Me, I'll take Kethol, Pirojil, and Durine.
Kethol: raw-boned, red-headed, and lanky, with deep-set eyes that alternated between staring off in whatever direction he had last been looking and constantly moving, constantly searching, although for what, I'd never been able to ask.
He noticed me noticing, and let or forced an easy grin across his face.
Pirojil: broad and squat, with a huge flattened nose, massive jaw and overhanging eyeridge. The top half of his right ear was gone; it looked like it had been chewed off, which could easily have been the case. His neck was too thick, and his receding chin was only one of several chins. Pirojil was probably the ugliest man I'd ever met, but with a broad smile that made his face comfortably homely, as long as you didn't look right at it.
I didn't. But he was watching me.
And then there was Durine: the big man, almost a head taller than Kethol. Bushy beard and unsmiling mouth on a face sitting over a bull neck; a chest like a beer barrel, thick, hairy arms, and huge, blunt fingers that seemed too wide to be adept with anything subtler than a club. Not particularly well-proportioned—his legs were just an irritating amount too short for his body—not particularly clever, not particularly friendly, and not particularly even-tempered.
And looking at me in a way that was not particularly pleasant.
More than two dozen men had set out with Karl on his Last Ride. These three had survived. Part of it was luck, I'm sure, but not all of it. There was something about them, something that smelled of death, maybe, and of suffering, and of men who had seen and done things that bothered them, but that they had lived through, and they could live through whatever they had to do to you, thank you very much.
Which is why I might have chosen them as bodyguards, but I didn't particularly like them.
Kethol leaned against a whitewashed wall, still chewing on a few slivers of flesh clinging to a drumstick from either a large capon or a medium-sized turkey.
He gestured with it. "A moment of your time, Walter Slovotsky?"
I liked that. Neither my name nor my effective position really fit into their view of the world, so all three of them called me by my full name, pronouncing my first name as though it was a title.
I dialed for an easy smile. "Of course, Kethol. What's going on?"
Durine spoke up, his voice a bass rumble, threatening a thunder that only sounded distant. "The Regent asked us to have a word with you. And perhaps one with the Baron Adahan, as well." His hands gestured clumsily, as they usually did when they weren't holding something that could stab, cut, or crush. "She says she wouldn't want any accidents to happen."
I held up both hands. "Ta havath, eh? I don't want a fight, any more than he does." Which was true, although I probably should have kept the anger out of my voice, if I wanted to be believed. Which I did.
Kethol nodded, trying to look as though he believed me. Durine's face held no expression.
Pirojil just looked skeptical. And ugly. "Things have been known to get out of hand."
"As we should know," Durine said, rubbing one huge finger against an old scar—not one I'd given him. I'd sparred with each of the three of them, but never with anything more than practice weapons, and never with any intention more serious than a good workout. Look, if I have to fight, my preference in an opponent would be a lame, one-legged, arthritic swordsman with cataracts and palsy—I don't need a fair fight, thank you very much.
Pirojil chuckled, and in a moment, Kethol joined him. Not one of the three offered to explain it to me. I hate in-jokes.
"Then you wouldn't mind the three of us keeping company with you for a short while on this fine day?" Kethol asked.
Sure. Just what I needed. Three large, murderous babysitters.
It didn't seem politic to refuse. And, besides, I was going to be doing a spot of adult babysitting myself. "Sure," I said. "You don't mind hitting the kennels first."
May as well let them in for the hard time as well as the good, although given what they'd been through from time to time, a bit of wolf dung wasn't going to be all that difficult to deal with.
* * *
I was surprised to find my daughter Janie in the kennels, but I shouldn't have been. She had been spending a lot of time with Nick and Nora, and they would always whine and whimper when she left them in their kennels.
Well, kennel is the best term, I guess, although it wasn't where the castle dogkeeper kept the dogs. The castle dogs didn't take to being kept near wolves, and if kenneled near Nick and Nora, would alternate between cowering in one corner of their cells and barking up a storm.
Which wasn't the only reason that the two of them had been moved to a newly built structure in an unused cor
ner of the keep. There had at one point been something there; a rough inlaid-stone floor sprawled out beyond the edges of the wolf pens. Just as well. Wolves dig, and dig well.
What Doria had ordered built filled the bill nicely, even if a six-foot-high wire fence looked out of place in the castle. The wolves didn't like the feel of the wire against their paws, and it hurt to try to climb it.
Janie had been feeding them over by their Snoopy-style doghouse, but they raised their heads at our approach and bounded over to the gate, waiting, tails wagging, Nick's thumping against the fence post with a rhythmic clinkity-clinkity-clinkity until Janie opened the fence and let them come out and greet me.
The three musketeers didn't like all this. Hands tended to hover near hilts, and the wolves didn't like the movement. Janie—like me—was part of the pack, but not the three of them.
She caught the movement and gave Nora a loud thump on the back. "Down, down, they're okay. You just leave them alone," she said, the voice of authority.
Teenage daughters are a problem. Today she was dressed in an imitation of Andy's leather road outfit: jacket-vest tight, midriff bare to equally tight leather jeans. With the rough boots and the addition of the leather overjacket now hanging on a fence post, it wasn't a bad outfit for running through the fields and woods with a pair of wolves, but it reminded me more than I was comfortable with that she had long since ceased being a girl and was well into woman.
While the outfit wasn't an invitation to rape—there's no such thing as an invitation to rape—it was an invitation to being hit on, even when her ensemble also included a pair of very territorial wolves. Just as well I don't really care if my daughter fools around.
She gave me a quick hug and a kiss—okay, she was still my baby, after sixteen or so years, although baby fat had long since given way to long, thin limbs, and chubby cheeks to a heart-shaped face framed in straight, short, black hair.
"Hi, Daddy."
Guardians of The Flame: To Home And Ehvenor (Guardians of the Flame #06-07) Page 33