“I’ll have to take the risk.” George rose smoothly. “In that case, I would still be grateful for your assistance. I would like you to escort me to that world and back. I can find a way to it from Baha-char but I will need you to lead me back to the inn.”
I rubbed my face. “You’re asking me to leave the inn while it’s full of guests.”
“Yes. I take full responsibility for it.”
“I don’t understand. You’re an Arbiter. You possess the technology to find the inn from Baha-char.”
“I don’t want to use the technology at my disposal for personal reasons,” George said.
“There is something you are not telling me.”
“He wants to go to a world that’s forbidden to us,” Jack said. “Our home world. If he uses any of the gadgets provided to us by the Arbitrator Court, he can be tracked. They’ll have his ass.”
I took a moment to mourn my empty plate and to think what I was going to say next without completely alienating the man in charge of signing the check. “So you want me to endanger my guests by leaving the inn and escort you on a mission that could potentially cause you to be sanctioned, derailing the peace talks and my payment and ruining the reputation of this inn. Could you help me understand why I should do that?”
Gaston laughed under his breath.
George sighed. “I’m just as invested in the success of the peace summit as you are. As matters stand now, I do not believe the peace talks will succeed. The problem is Ruah, the bulletproof swordsman.”
Aha. Was he implying that Gertrude Hunt couldn’t handle one otrokar? “Do you doubt my ability to suppress him?”
George grimaced. “That’s not the issue. I know that you can subdue Ruah. The problem is the otrokar mindset. The otrokari acknowledge that a single vampire is a better rounded warrior; however, they have an unshakable faith in their own supremacy through the use of genetic specialization. They choose their specialization in adolescence. As they undergo rigorous training in their chosen specialty, their bodies develop to match it. Ruah is the pinnacle of that process. They believe he is unbeatable with a sword. As long as he reigns supreme, he makes them feel invincible. I have to shatter that faith. I have to prove to them that he and the Horde are not infallible and I have to do it in terms they will understand.”
“Why not use the vampires?” I asked.
“Because that would simply flip the coin.” Caldenia strode into the kitchen. Her hair was meticulously styled, her pale green gown flattered her face, and her make-up was flawless. Her eyes were sharp and her bearing had a slightly predatory air to it. Her Grace was back.
The three men bowed. She nodded at them and accepted a cup of tea from Orro.
“If he uses a knight to defeat an undefeatable otrokar, the same immunity the otrokari now feel will be transferred to the Holy Anocracy. To get them to cooperate and work together, both sides must be humbled. He has to shake their very worldview.”
“I am willing to put my career at risk,” George said, “because I believe it to be completely necessary. This isn’t a spur of the moment decision.”
I had a feeling that nothing George ever did was a spur of the moment decision. If he ever had a one night stand, it would probably be meticulously researched and organized.
The ball was in my court. Leaving so many guests unattended was crazy. But George had a point. The longer peace talks dragged on, the more rejuvenated the inn became, but also the more money their presence cost us. The summit had to end in a reasonable time frame and it had to end with peace, not war. If the summit failed, there would be plenty of blame to go around and Gertrude Hunt would earn a big black eye.
What to do? We’d be gone over an hour at least. A lot of things could happen in an hour. Officer Marais could return with backup. The otrokari could try to bust through the walls and go on a rampage. The vampires could set fire to the inn…
Okay, I had to stop. Wild theories got me nowhere.
My mother would not approve of this harebrained scheme. But my dad would think it was an adventure. Even my parents were no help.
“Escort me to Baha-char,” George said. “I promise you, I can take things from there.”
If we got caught, George would be in trouble and I would be in trouble with him.
“Breakfast is due to be served to the guests in their quarters in half an hour,” I said. “According to the schedule, the summit is to begin an hour after breakfast. That gives us about an hour and a half. Your people have to uphold the peace until then.”
“Won’t be an issue,” Jack said.
I rose. “We have to hurry.”
***
I crouched on the floor of a small shop. Beautiful pale carpets lined the walls and the floor, providing a backdrop for hundreds of elaborate pieces of lacquerware painted with meticulous patterns of vivid turquoise, cheerful gold, and bright scarlet. Jugs shaped like exotic birds, plates where strange monsters curved in battle with each other, platters filled with foreign blooms filled the shelves and waited in every corner. It was good that I took very little money with me, or I would have walked out of here with something.
George, wearing a plain brown cloak, crouched next to me, deep in negotiations with the owner of the shop. The shopkeeper was so swaddled in layers of blue and white tattered cloth that nothing except his eyes and a narrow strip of olive skin around them was visible. He waved his hands as he haggled with George in an unfamiliar language. His hands looked human enough, but each had only three fingers and a thumb.
It took us about ten minutes to find the shop and we had been crouching here for so long, my legs were beginning to ache. I could feel time dripping away, one drop at a time. Part of me really wanted to be back at the inn. A smaller part wanted to find Wilmos again and ask him about Sean Evans.
The trader rose off his haunches. George stood up and dropped a small pouch into the trader’s hand. The shopkeeper handed a ball of blue yarn to George, tied the end of it to a shelf, walked to the back of the store and pulled a carpet aside. Morning daylight filled the shop. The shopkeeper waved at us.
Great. Here is a magic thread. Hold on to it so you don’t get lost and hope there isn’t a minotaur waiting to meet you.
George stepped to the light, letting the yarn pull from the ball as he walked. I got up and followed him. A vast garden spread before us, rows and rows of roses, surrounded by a forty foot wall of burgundy colored stone. Here and there towers punctuated the wall.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“This is Ganer College,” George said. “In my world it’s a place of healing.”
A woman walked among the roses. She was about my height. Her very dark brown hair coiled on her head into a conservative but elegant bun. A grey gown hugged her figure, falling down in straight lines, its hem brushing the pebbles of the path as she walked. A gossamer-thin length of matching grey fabric wrapped the gown from the left, draped in an asymmetric swag over the woman’s left shoulder. She seemed about my age and not particularly tall, strong, or very imposing.
I glanced at George. For a moment his cool mask slipped and I saw an intense, all consuming longing reflected in his features. My father loved my mother completely. He also mistrusted the modern world. He understood it, but it moved too fast for him and all of its dangers seemed magnified to him. He viewed each drive to the store as a failed suicide attempt and each major city as a den of cutthroats and thieves lying in wait for their victim. He would never dream of keeping my mother from doing something she wanted to do. But sometimes when my mother was about to leave on an errand, especially if she had to drive into the city, he would look at her just like that, as if he wanted more than anything in the world to wrap his arms around her and keep her safe with him.
The expression flickered and vanished off George’s face, but it was too late. I saw it. The cosmic arbiter was not infallible.
George started down the path and I followed him. When we were about thirty feet from the woman, she sto
pped. “That’s far enough.”
George stopped.
“I am angry with you,” she said. She spoke with an unfamiliar but cultured accent. “I don’t like to be angry, George. I work very diligently to avoid that emotion. You should leave.”
“I need your help,” he said.
She turned around. I almost never got envious of other women. When I did, it was usually because I had gone grocery shopping. I’d stand in a checkout line, bored, and People magazine or some tabloid would catch my eye and I’d buy it, because I felt too guilty about putting it back after flipping through it. I would look at the actresses and models while drinking my tea and sometimes wish my eyes were bigger or my lips were fuller. But actresses and models were abstract people, half reality, half air-brushed perfection. This woman was real, she was my age, about my height, and she was incredibly, shockingly beautiful without any Photoshop assistance. Her skin was a light, golden bronze, her mouth was full and perfect, her cheekbones high, and her eyes, huge under nearly black eyebrows, were dark like bitter chocolate. When you saw her, you wanted to keep looking at her.
Right now she was looking at George and the way her eyebrows bent, George was clearly not her favorite person.
“You didn’t tell them,” she said. “You had dinner with the family at Camarine manor. You helped little William catch fireflies in a jar, you brought presents for the girls, and you sat on the balcony and drank wine with Declan and your sister. A week later you were simply gone.”
“I left a note,” George said.
“The note that said that you were going on a secret mission off-world and taking Jack and Gaston with you and that you would be back later in twenty years. This is all you left by the way of explanation. Do you have any idea how worried your sister is? Your nieces? Your nephew? You play with people’s lives like they are toys, George. We are all chess pieces to you. You move us around the board as you please. I could understand if you were oblivious to human emotions, but you fully comprehend our feelings. You simply choose to ignore them. I don’t understand it. You used to be so compassionate when we were children. Now we don’t matter to you at all.”
“It’s part of a job,” he said.
She simply looked at him.
“I was not permitted to say good-bye. The note was the best I could do.”
“But here you are.” Her eyes narrowed. “Didn’t you tell me that once you accepted this job, you could not come back? Are you breaking the rules again?”
“Of course I am.”
“So you have no problems breaking the rules when it suits you. Are you telling me that you couldn’t find any way to personally soften that blow for your family?”
“I’m a selfish bastard,” George said. “I didn’t want the pain of saying good-bye, so I avoided it.”
The woman sighed. “What is it you want?”
“I need your help.”
“You already asked me. The answer was no then. It’s still no. I am not going on your mad adventure. My home is here.”
George brushed his cane with his thumb. An image of Ruah appeared in thin air. We watched him spin his swords and slice through bullets. The woman tilted her head, tapping her bottom lip with her index finger. The recording stopped with the otrokar paused in mid-strike, graceful like a dancer.
“Cute,” she said. “He’s good.”
“Is he better than you?” George asked.
She pondered the still image. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you want to find out?”
A predatory spark flashed in her eyes and died. “No.”
“Come with me,” George said. “Please.”
“George, I worked for years to put aside what the world outside of those walls made me. Out there I am an abomination. I’m a killer. No, I belong here.”
He shook his head. “Lark…”
“The name is Sophie,” she corrected.
“What is here? This?” He turned, raising his hands to encompass the flowers.
“Here I am not a monster.” She raised her head. “Here I do not kill anyone. I am at peace here.”
“Your peace is a lie.”
She glared at him and I fought an urge to step back. “You have no right to tell me how to live my life. Let me be. Leave me alone, George. I want to be at peace!”
“You are not meant to be at peace. We, the human beings, we are meant to live life to its fullest. We are meant to experience it all, sadness, disappointment, rage, kindness, joy, love. We are meant to test ourselves. It is painful and frightening, but this is what it means to be alive. You are hiding from life here. This isn’t peace. This is a slow deliberate suicide.”
He stabbed his cane into the pathway. Images exploded: a vast roiling nebula, spaceships, planets, ancient ruins, strange buildings, terrible and beautiful beings… They spun around us, vivid, bright, loud…. Sophie looked at them and stars reflected in her eyes.
“Look at it!” George’s voice shuddered with barely contained awe. “Look at it! Don’t you want to experience it? Don’t you want to be brave? You are not a gentle flower who spends its whole life in a greenhouse. You are a wildfire, Lark. A wildfire.”
A sun burst on the images, its violent fury drowning the cosmos.
“Dare to take that step and I will show you wonders beyond your imagination. I will give you a chance to make a difference. Come with me.” George offered his hand to her. “Live. Join me or not, but live, gods damn you, because I cannot stand the thought of you slowly aging here like some dusty fossil under glass. Take my hand and bring your sword. The Universe is waiting.”
Chapter 7
We entered the inn twenty minutes before the start of the summit. Jack greeted us in the front room. A wide grin split his face.
He looked Sophie up and down, scrutinizing her gown and the two swords she carried in her hands. “What is it you’re wearing? Are you trying to be mistaken for a girl?”
Sophie arched her eyebrows and punched him in the arm.
“What was that for?”
“That was for leaving without telling anyone good-bye.”
I turned to George, who was carrying Sophie’s large canvas bag. “You can set that down.”
He carefully placed the bag on the floor and it sank into the wood. Sophie’s eyes widened.
“Come with me, please,” I told her. “I will show you to your room.”
I led her down the east hallway. The best place would be near Caldenia, in the neutral wing. I had already explained the inn and the rules of being a guest. “I am going to put you next to a permanent guest of the inn.”
“You’re irritated with George,” Sophie said. “Why?”
I blinked.
“Don’t feel bad. You hid it very well, but I’ve been trained to read body language.”
I sighed. “I have less than fifteen minutes with you. I have to be there when the summit starts. Welcoming a guest to the inn is a duty innkeepers hold sacred. It must be done properly, but George left me no time. I hate to rush.”
Caldenia stepped out of her room. “Another guest? How delightful.”
“Her Grace, Caldenia ka ret Magren,” I said.
Sophie dropped into an elegant curtsy and rose.
Caldenia’s eyes sparkled. “And what is your name, my dear?”
“Sophie.”
“Just Sophie?”
Sophie smiled. “For now.”
“Are you going to view the summit?” Caldenia asked.
“I was considering it.”
“You absolutely must visit me. I have an entire balcony to myself.”
“I would be delighted,” Sophie said.
“It is settled then.” Her Grace smiled and proceeded down the hallway, her gown flaring behind her with regal majesty.
I paused before the door. Normally I would have offered her some refreshments and spoken with her in the front room, slowly building her room based on her responses. There was no time. I had to guess. Argh. What would Sop
hie like? She held herself with a kind of measured poise that seemed natural but was probably the result of years of etiquette training and education. Caldenia had picked up on it immediately. They were from different worlds but they likely moved in similar circles, those of aristocratic educated women. When I looked at her, I pictured her in a Southern mansion, all white colonnades and plush furniture, but something didn’t seem quite right. So, clean and elegantly muted furnishings in a traditional style or tastefully elaborate pattern medley of English countryside?
“She isn’t human, is she?” Sophie asked.
“No.”
“Her teeth are sharp and pointed.”
“She is very dangerous,” I said. There was something about Sophie behind all of that polish and refinement, a kind of hidden fragility. Perhaps fragility was the wrong word. Brittleness, like a blade that was too sharp. No, neither clean and elegant nor elaborate. Damn it, George. I had to commit to something. I couldn’t just stand there before the door.
Go with your gut feeling. That’s what Mom always said.
“Caldenia will do nothing to harm you, because the inn is her refuge and she knows that attacking another guest, unless it was done in self-defense, would violate our agreement. She is very manipulative, however.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Sophie said.
I opened the door. Golden pine floors stretched to the wooden walls painted with a gentle beige. I left the wall framing exposed, as if all of the insulation had been stripped out. A simple but comfortable bed, built with rough Louisiana cypress, offered a thick mattress in a sturdy frame, plush white covers, and plump pillows. A beige woven rug, none too new, shielded the floor. Pale green curtains framed two wide windows, offering a view of the orchard. Between them a door permitted access to a long wooden balcony. A roughly hewn bookshelf in the corner held several paperbacks. A weapon rack waited next to the bookshelf, ready to receive swords.
Rustic modern. I had no idea why I went that way, but it felt right.
I turned to Sophie and almost stepped back. She looked shocked.
Damn it, she hated it. What was I thinking? Mixing pine and cypress, it didn’t even make sense…
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