Guardians of The Flame: To Home And Ehvenor (The Guardians of the Flame #06-07) (45 page)

But the back of my mind whispered:
she didn't know that, now did she?
 

He held out his hand. "I doubt that we'll ever find a permanent arrangement that suits all of us, but in the interim I suggest a temporary one, just for you and me."

"Oh?"

"Truce," he said, extending a hand. "And more than a truce. I'll cover your back—I'll go out on the road with you and Andrea." He shrugged. "I've been absent enough from my barony; Ranella runs things just fine without me. Until then, nobody will see anything that's not rubbed in his face, eh?"

But can I trust you, Bren Adahan? 
 

"It would have to be understood that I'd be in charge on the road," I said. It's one thing to let Ahira call the shots, and another thing entirely to trust somebody who would be better off with me dead.

He nodded. "I believe the phrase is that if you ask me to jump, I inquire as to how high on the way up?"

"I like it better that when I tell you to take a shit, you squat and ask 'What color?', but you've got the idea."

"It's understood, Walter Slovotsky—I understand that command can't be divided, and that somebody has to be in charge."

Whether I meant it or not, the right thing to do was to say, "You've got a deal, Baron." It could be fixed later. He could be fixed later.

So I did the right thing.

His smile was perhaps a millimeter too wide, and I didn't like it. It said that he was thinking two moves ahead of me, which was entirely possible, given that I didn't know what my next move was. I couldn't see putting things back together with Kirah, I just couldn't, not if that meant giving up Aeia. I had come home determined to do just that, but the combination of finding Bren in Kirah's bed and finding Aeia warming not just my bed but my life had turned that resolve into dust and ashes.

Life gets too goddamn complicated.

We had started to walk back toward the others when Adahan snorted.

"Some things, Walter Slovotsky, should be a lot simpler," he said.

I smiled. I could simplify things with a quick knife move, but I'd already given that up and really didn't consider it. I wouldn't mind stabbing an unarmed man, not if that was the right thing to do, but it wasn't, and that was that.

"I know," I said.

He reached up and cut a sprig from a tree overhead.

Cut?

His smile broadened as he slipped the knife back into his waistband. "It's too bad I won't stab an unarmed man."

I forced myself to nod and shrug. "You've got a point."

I met Andrea Cullinane down in the fencing studio just at noon, as usual.

She was dressed only in a tight cotton halter incongruously above a pair of bulky drawstring pantaloons. The tight halter plumped up her breasts, which didn't particularly need it, leaving her long midriff bare almost to her hips, where the bulky pantaloons concealed the long legs that I had reason to remember with some affection.

"Good ride this morning?"

She smiled. "Good enough. But don't think I'm too tired to move on to the next item on the agenda."

"Wouldn't think of it."

Her long black hair was pulled back tight into a ponytail, which made her ears seem to stick out a trifle, kind of pixieish.

Well, maybe it wasn't incongruous, after all; the purpose of the halter wasn't to make her look great—although it did. Jouncing up and down wasn't likely to do her breasts any good, and while it was amazing what subtle damage a good healing cleric could correct, it was also a bad idea to count on it.

There's a kind of beauty a woman gets as she moves into her late thirties and early forties, if she's lucky. It's not the same thing as the prettiness of a girl in her late teens and twenties, where youthful energy mixes with a sort of pneumatic dynamism that's all fresh and bubbly, even if a bit raw at the edges.

No, there's something else that happens for that period of time between when the baby fat disappears and when the wrinkles take over, when something I think of as balance can make her sexy as all hell. I can't remember a lot of Playboy Playmates in their forties, so I guess it doesn't show up as well on film as it does in the flesh, but Andy had been pretty when I first met her, and was getting more beautiful every year.

Which wasn't something it was a great idea for me to be thinking about the mother—adopted or otherwise—of Aeia.

I stripped off my shirt and tossed it into a corner.

Andy smiled knowingly as she reached for a pair of practice swords. She tossed one to me, flipping it end-over-end.

"Protect yourself, Walter," she said.

I had to lunge back a half step to catch the sword by the hilt, and by then she was almost on me, her lunge a classic extension from left ankle to right wrist. A sensible man would have been too busy defending himself to notice how sexy she looked that way, but I've never been accused of being sensible.

Oversexed, maybe, but not sensible.

I slapped the blade to one side with the flat of my left hand while I settled the hilt into my right, then swung at her arm with my own practice sword.

Needless to say, her arm wasn't there anymore. The full lunge forward had been followed by a classic recover that brought her out of range and back to a nice en garde position.

I tried a double-feint lunging attack, and only had to hold back a trifle to let her beat it aside.

She was picking this stuff up fast. I said as much.

"Ten years of dance class, Walter," she said, as she tried another attack. "A bit of jazz, and my ballet teacher managed to get me up on toe after less than a year—" she emphasized the last word with a very pretty disengage and lunge.

My built-in skills and almost twenty years of practice were enough to keep her attack at bay, although she did manage to back me up almost all the way across the room. I saw her eyes widen as we approached the balance beam, and could almost see the picture in her mind of me falling ass-backward. Never one to let it be said that Walter Slovotsky would let a lady down, I let my right heel bump into it, then threw up my hands as though fighting for balance.

She was still too green, although it was a close call—but with my hands that high, I was exposed for a thigh wound at the very least, and she should have gone for it. If you can get a disabler, take it; going in for the kill can wait.

But she was still new at this: instead, she took a step forward, waiting for an even better opportunity as I fought for balance or fell.

I whipped my sword down, hard, slashing against her free arm even harder, then fell into a fighting crouch as she turned to bring the hurt arm away from me, and caught her sword hand with the tip of my practice blade hard enough to make her drop her sword.

Give her credit: she didn't scream, but just grunted as the sword fell from her fingers.

I didn't drop my own blade. The lesson wasn't over. "Don't take anything for granted, Andy. Pretending to be hurt, to lose balance, to have a phony tell on an attack—it's all part of the standard repertoire." I wouldn't give her half a chance in a real fight against a real swordsman—except for the surprise factor. Which might be enough. And another few months of this, and who knows? She was talented, and dedicated, and that counts for a lot.

She raised her hands, clasping her fingers behind her neck. "Point taken, sir. I surrender."

That made me mad. "In the field, you know what that means as well as I do. You can't ever afford to lose, or—"

"Or?" The corners of her mouth lifted, and she did something behind her neck with the ties of her halter, and it fell free as she took a step forward, her breasts hobbling free as she gently pushed my sword arm aside and came into my arms. "Or what?" she whispered, her breath warm on my neck.

I started to push her away—"Andy, this isn't a good idea," I started to say—when I felt something sharp and cold prickling at the back of my neck.

She wasn't smiling anymore. "I'm sorry, but I don't have a practice knife—I guess the real thing will have to do. Drop the sword, Walter."

Her smile was broad, but it wasn't pleasant. Think of a lion smiling at a lamb. "If this was for real, I wouldn't have given you that chance." Gentle fingers rested on my second and third rib; a less gentle one poked at the flesh between them. "I would have stuck it here, real,
real
hard," she said, her voice all honeyed and breathy.

As my swordhilt thudded on the floor, she added: "And twisted."

I tried to look mad, but the truth is that I was proud of her.

There is a simple, guaranteed way that any woman can make herself look more beautiful to you. More effective than the most expensive of carefully applied cosmetics, more than surgery, than exercise, or hairstyle, or any combination of the above.
It's simple: she can leave you for another man.
 

—Walter Slovotsky

The dream is always the same:

We're trying to make our escape from Hell, millions of us streaming down the endless rows of gym lockers, past the searing lava showers, toward the glowing Open sign, and safety. 
 

There's too many of us, of course; I'm on the outside of the crowd, and I keep banging my shin against the locker-room benches, picking up as many bruises as splinters. Once we made it to This Side, I would have bet that there wasn't a chance in hell I'd spend time in a gym again, but, shit, we are in Hell, eh? 
 

Behind us, the demons come. Some are clouds of acid fog that can eat through a body so fast it will only scream for an eon as it dissolves; others are huge wolves, or curiously mutated cats, their ears long and tufted, their fangs long and yellow. There's one that looks like a pus-covered Pillsbury Doughboy, but there's nothing at all funny about him. 
 

They're all chasing us, and they're all getting closer, and we're not all going to escape. 
 

"We'll hold them here," Karl Cullinane shouts. "Who stands with me?"

The crowd rushes away, leaving some of us behind. 
 

The old man in the ill-fitting British private's uniform puzzles me for a moment—he's too old to be a private soldier—until I hear Eleanor Roosevelt, wrinkled and homely in that comforting way, call him by name and invite him to stand beside her, and then I know it's Colonel Meinertzhagen, slipping out for yet another battle. 
 

A short, slim old man, his eyes nearsighted and in a permanent squint from too many years of examining things too closely, his fingers not quite trembling with age, smiles and gives a shrug as he stoops to send his three grandchildren running toward the exit, then tosses his black bag to one side and steps forward to link arms with the old Roman general. 
 

The general stands himself up straight and murmurs something that I know is old, vulgar Latin—his words end in "-o" where I think there should be an "-us"—but that in the clarity you get only in a dream I know means "It's an honor to stand with you, Doctor."

"Why, General?" he says, his voice thin and reedy. "Wouldn't you have come out of retirement to take care of your grandchildren, if they needed you?"

I don't hear the beginning of the Roman's answer, just "—honors appropriate to the honored."

"I never had any children," another old man says, stepping forward to take the doctor's other arm, "and never even made lieutenant commander, much less flag rank." Under a short brush mustache his smile is not entirely friendly but completely reassuring. He holds his back too straight, beyond that which you expect from a fencer, and maybe that's because he's always been a stiff-necked old bastard, with every bit as much stubbornness as insight—but that's his virtue, not his flaw, and even in a dream I wouldn't change a hair on his permanently balding head any more than I'd dare to change a word he'd written. "But I don't believe they can invalid me out of this one," he says, accepting Cincinnatus' nod as his due. 

He is there again, past the old withered form of Tennetty, past Karl Cullinane, still strong and powerful in his old age: the leader of the band of sailors, his beard white as milk. 

"Though much is taken, much abides," he says. "Younger, I would have tricked them into following me away, and lured them to their doom," he says. "Younger, I would have tried to trade wit for blood. But today, I shall stand with you, and we will hold them, I swear we will." This time the voice is too harsh, as though he had once ruined it, screaming until he'd hurt himself, and there are scars on his powerful arms. Strong arms and shoulders—well-developed as though he was an oarsman, perhaps? Or an archer? There's another scar above his knee, and I know that means something, but what? There's something in his manner that tells of a habit of command, and his eyes see too far. 

Karl just claps a hand to his shoulder. His voice cracks around the edges, not with fear, but with age. "We will hold them," Karl says. "Who else is with me?"

Then I wake up.

I took my time putting on a fresh white ruffled shirt, black linen trousers pegged nicely at the knee, and a short cape thrown carelessly over my left shoulder—neatly covering the open neck that not only revealed my manly chest but also gave me easy access to the flat knife strapped just below my left armpit—added a few other weapons here and there, and made my way downstairs.

Kirah was already down in the Great Hall of Castle Cullinane. She had dressed for dinner in a black velvet gown that set off her blond hair and light skin wonderfully in the firelight. She had been spending daylight hours inside of late, it seemed; the light sprinkling of freckles I remembered from the old days was gone from her creamy shoulders.

She made me feel all clumsy, and I didn't much like that. "Hi there," I said, wondering where to put my hands. Damn trousers didn't have pockets, but even that would have been clumsy.

I never used to wonder where to put my hands when I was with Kirah.

She smiled briefly, gently. "Good evening, Walter. Did you have a good day?"