Guardians of The Flame: To Home And Ehvenor (The Guardians of the Flame #06-07) (64 page)

I heard "Hi, Daddy," and my baby daughter was already slapping her hands against the dragon's scaly side before my trembling fingers could release me from my harness and lower me to the ground. "Everybody's okay."

Things got a little fuzzy after that. I do remember not being bothered by the way that Bren Adahan swooped up Kirah into his arms, and the sounds of his sobbing mixed with his laughter, and I remember hurting both of us when I hugged Janie—the pistol stuck into her belt pressed too hard against both of our hips.

And maybe most of all I remember Aeia, her breath warm in my ear. "I
told
you I'd wait for you." And I will never forget how good it felt to have her mouth warm on mine.

But it wasn't all solemn; I laugh when I remember Doria's words of greeting: "I don't know what you're crying about, Walter. We're the ones who had to clean this all up."

You want details? I wanted details.

Which is all I got, and only bit by bit.

Like:

Andy, midevening, her face lit almost demonically by the only light in the room, a flickering oil lamp on the table at her elbow. She sat back in an overstuffed easy chair, still wearing her leathers, one leather-encased leg thrown carelessly over the chair's arm. It was a nice leg. "I was just outside my room, to take my boots off and go to bed, when one of the bastards snaked his arm around my neck. What he got started with a bootheel raked down his shin from knee to ankle, and ended sometime later with his head on a pole." She shrugged. "If he'd wanted me dead, he could have had that. Tried to get fancy; figured he'd play for a while first." She smiled. "Bad choice."

Like:

Janie, late at night in the watchtower on the southwest corner of the castle's wall, her eyes on the night, a bowl of iced sweetlemon glacé precariously balanced on the rail. I wasn't prepared to believe that the killings hadn't affected her, but she wasn't ready to discuss it. Just:

"Well, Jason left his spare pistol with me, and I don't think they were ready to deal with a six-shooter." She shrugged. "And then there were these two." She bent to pat the head of Nick, who gazed lovingly up at her, while Nora eyed me with something between distrust and distaste.

I reached out to put an arm around Janie's waist, but Nora's ears flattened until Janie shook her head and gestured at Nora to be still.

"Nice doggies," I said.

"Depends on if you play nice or not." Janie smiled.

Like:

Fat U'len in her kitchen just before dawn, her cleaver beating a rapid tattoo against her cutting board, shredding a piece of ham into strips that looked like short, pink noodles. "Kirah and my Doranne were here in the kitchen when two of them broke in, and one of them went for the baby." She gestured over to the tiny mattress and blanket in the corner, separated from the stove by a wooden latticework that let the heat keep the sleeper warm. "I didn't do much," she said, as her massive arms worked the pump over the sink, more sluicing off than rinsing an onion. A quick stroke took off its roots, another its head, and a quick slice-and-flick removed the brown outer skin. Another series of rapid strokes against the cutting board made the onion appear to fly apart, leaving behind only a neat little minced pile. "Kirah had her knitting with her, and she pulled out a pair of knitting needles and jumped one of them, which gave me enough time to get to my cleaver," she said, gently breaking an egg against the blade, economically dropping the yolk and white into a bowl and in the same motion tossing the shells into the garbage bin. "Just as happy we had the healing draughts handy," she said. "She got herself hurt, although he got himself hurt more. Now, if I'm going to make you an omelette, you'd better eat it all, understood?" She gestured with the cleaver. "Understood?"

"Yes'm."

Like:

Doria, once again curled up on her chair in the foyer. "You can give Aeia a lot of the credit. Her and Andy. She heard somebody out in the hall trying to walk too quietly, and got me out of my room. It was about that time that Andy showed up, armed for bear, ready for blood. She and Aeia were going to get Kirah and the baby up from downstairs when it all hit the fan." She patted at my leg. "We would have liked having you around, Walter, but we didn't need you." She shrugged, and smiled, and hugged me. "Sorry if that makes you feel unwanted."

Like:

Doranne at the breakfast table, more stabbing at than eating her raisin-spotted porridge. "Bad man said he was going to hurt me. Mommy and U'len stopped him, and Mommy told me not to look." She looked up at me and smiled. "It's okay, Daddy. Medicine made Mommy better, and they wouldn't give medicine to the bad man."

Like:

Aeia in our bed, laughing and sweaty above me, the tips of her hair like silk against my face. "Walter, you worry too much."

Out in the night, flame roared skyward, partly in laughter, partly in relief.

Tyranny and anarchy are never far asunder. 
 

—Jeremy Bentham

Give me a place to stand, and I'll probably move along anyway. 
 

—Walter Slovotsky

The nightmare is always the same:

We're trying to make our escape from Hell, millions of us running through the immense castle's unbelievably long corridors, past the empty rooms, toward the main gate, and safety. 
 

Too many of us, no matter how much the corridor widens, there's always too many of us; I'm constantly being scraped against the red-hot walls, blisters flaring and bursting with a horrid pain that doesn't go away even as they disappear. 
 

Everybody I've ever loved is there, and some of them look to me for guidance, as though I'm supposed to know something. What the hell do they want of me? 
 

Behind us, the demons follow: silent men in black, blades flowering from their fingertips, seeking innocent flesh. 
 

We follow the crowd as it plunges into a stairwell at the end of the corridor and down through the endless spiral of staircase that I hope leads to safety, as though safety is a place. 
 

They're all swept away from me: Janie, reaching out a hand to bring her baby sister along; Aeia, mouthing a promise to wait for me; Doria, smiling reassuringly as she vanishes in the crowd; Kirah, with a quick squeeze on my arm that speaks of a lingering sort of affection. 
 

"Once more," Karl says, a hand clasped to my shoulder. "One last time, Walter."

And then what, asshole? 
 

They all line up, blocking the corridor. All the old ones, too old to do this, but unwilling to give in to age, any more than they'd accept defeat by any other enemy. 
 

"But we're not here," old Jonas Salk says, his right hand shattering a demon with just a gesture, "this is just your dream, just a figment of your imagination. I'd be in my lab, where I belong."

Eleanor Roosevelt rends another demon with her fingers, and tosses it aside. "And I would be giving speeches, I trust, where they would be listened to. That's my place, Walter."

Sister Berthe reaches out a gentle hand to pat my shoulder, then pulls the ruler out of her habit and slaps another demon into dust. "I taught you what a metaphor is, Walter. That's all your dreams are. You don't have to be so," she sniffs, "literal all the time."

The old sailor is there, his beard white as fleece against his lined, leathery face, the scar on his leg, taking his position next to me— 
 

Omygod. I know who he is, finally. 
 

" 'Though much is taken, much remains,' " I say to him, and he smiles. 

"Some work of noble note," he says, "but it need not be your work of yesterday." He looks down at me, concerned. "You're getting a bit too old for this, Cricket," he says, his face my father's, his voice Big Mike's. "You can't be a young stud all your life. Time to learn how to be an older stud, eh?"

And then I wake up.

Doria and Bren Adahan were downstairs in a room off the main corridor that had always been called the Prince's Den for no reason that anybody I knew of knew.

She was wearing a black robe, as though she had come from bed, but there was a suspicious bulge at the waistline under it that made me decide this was no accident.

Bren looked like an ad for some sort of postcoital clothing catalogue: a thin, loose, long cotton shirt open to the waist, the high collar almost covering a bite mark at the base of his neck.

He smiled a greeting, and I returned it as I plopped down in the chair next to Doria's.

"Late-night crowd, eh?" I asked as I reached for a bit of sweetroll on the plate by her elbow.

Doria shrugged her shoulders. They were nice shoulders. "And you've been dreaming again. Care to talk about it?"

"Ulysses," I said. "I've been dreaming of all the old ones, starting with Ulysses."

At the edge of my vision, Bren's forehead wrinkled, but Doria nodded. " 'To sail beyond the sunset,' eh?" She turned to Bren. "It's a poem some of us studied, about an old king, too old for wandering and adventuring, who sets out again, because even if he's not what he once was . . ." She closed her eyes for a moment.

" 'Tho' much is taken,' " she said, opening her eyes and looking at me, " 'much abides; and tho'

" 'We are not now that strength which in old days

" 'Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are . . . ' " Her voice trailed off.

It had been too many years since Sister Berthe had taught me the poem, but the years didn't matter.

" ' . . . that which we are, we are;

" 'One equal temper of heroic hearts,

" 'Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

" 'To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.' " I shrugged. "Sorry; I can't give it all up. And I'm not going to try."

She nodded. "So, you're leaving us?" Doria was always a step or two beyond me.

"Yes, and no." I thought about it for a moment, and thought about how neither Bren nor I was meeting the other's eyes, and how that wasn't because we were angry or anything, but because we'd divided the world into halves, his to watch out for and mine.

I didn't particularly like him, and I very much didn't like the thought of Kirah lying warm in his arms at night, but sometimes it doesn't matter even to me what I like.

"The point isn't to keep doing what you've been doing until you get too old for it, but to keep making yourself useful. I'm starting to slow down, and while I'm more than a match for most, I'm not a match for all. 'Tho' much is taken, much abides'—I'm going to have to leave this jumping out of windows and fighting in alleyways for the younger folks sooner or later, and I'd better get used to the idea that that's a good thing, not a bad thing. There's other things I can do, and not necessarily boring ones, either."

Doria smiled. "Still a little fight in the old boy, eh?"

"Maybe." I shrugged.

You up for a night flight tomorrow night? I asked Ellegon.

*Depends where, I suppose. Oh, sure. Why not? What have you got in mind?*

Job interview. 
 

Bren looked over at me, and tilted his head to one side. "You want some company?"

I nodded. "I was sort of counting on it."

It is not enough to be busy; so are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about? 
 

—Henry David Thoreau

While it doesn't get the good press that hard work and industry get, laziness is a talent to be cultivated, like any other. 
 

—Walter Slovotsky

The room was dark, almost completely dark, lit only by shreds of distant lantern light leaking in under the door to the hallway outside. Enough for me, mind; my night vision has always been good, and I'd taken the precaution of blindfolding myself on the trip over to give my eyes plenty of time to adapt to the dark. Ellegon had dropped us off on the roof of the donjon quite silently before more noisily arriving in the courtyard, and it had hardly been any trouble at all to work our way down from the top and into the room.

He lay alone in his massive bed, which made things simpler. I mean, we could have handled it if he had company, but I liked it this way.

Bren Adahan grinned wolfishly as he drew his sword and lightly, gently touched the sleeping Emperor on the chest.

Give him credit: Thomen came awake instantly, and neither cried out nor reached for the hidden flintlock pistol that had been tucked under his mattress, but now was displayed quite prominently in my belt.

"Good evening, Your Majesty," Bren said, striking a match and lighting Thomen's bedside lantern. Golden light flared, casting shadows all about the room, lighting Bren's face demonically from below.

Thomen's head jerked around, first toward him, and then toward me. His beard was all crushed and his mustache kind of askew, as though he'd been sleeping, which seemed reasonable, since he'd been sleeping. I would have offered him a comb, a brush, and a few minutes to get himself together, but that would have ruined the effect.

"We've come about a couple of jobs," I said. "I think you need a pair of special representatives, for difficult political problems. Care to review my qualifications?"

Sometime or another, Thomen had learned to be a politician; I couldn't tell anything by the expression on his face. "I had thought I'd offered you such a position, not too long ago."

I shook my head. "No. I'm not talking about running around playing catch every time your mother finds something that likes to throw spears. We may have other projects in the fire, every now and then."

"Seems likely. When things quiet down in Pandathaway, I intend to kill whoever it is that sent assassins after Kirah and her daughters," Bren said, without heat, in the quiet way that a death sentence is passed.