Sasharia En Garde

SASHARIA EN GARDE

Sherwood Smith

www.bookviewcafe.com

Book View Café Edition
August 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61138-546-5
Copyright © 2015 Sherwood Smith

To M. She knows why.

The rap, rap, rap at the front door beat a counter-rhythm
to the rapping in my skull.

I sighed, and sat up. Remembered that I didn’t have anything
on as the typical January Los Angeles heat wave had given us a ninety-degree
morning.

Rap-rap-RAP!
They
weren’t going to go away.

I pulled my bedspread around me, and my hair swung down over
it like a neo-pre-Raphaelite cloak as I lurched out of my bedroom, kicking
aside a train of gold silk fringe at each step.

Mentally preparing some sizzling remarks, I yanked open the
front door. Instead of somebody begging money for some cult or a door-to-door
sales scammer, a pair of older men faced me expectantly, one short and stocky,
one tall and lean.

Not American men, oh no. Their clothes didn’t fit them
right, they didn’t stand with the slump-shouldered bend I was used to in L.A.
guys, and their eyes were pinkish at the rims in reaction to the smog. I knew
that because once, years ago, I had come from pure, clean air to the
smog-clogged heat of Los Angeles, though that had not been the sole reason my
eyes had been red.

“What,” I snapped, my head pounding too hard for thought, or
I would have slammed the door at once. Instead I almost lost my grip on the
brocade coverlet, and then had to bat my long, frizzy locks of hair behind me.

Both of them stared at the coverlet. The one’s eyes widened,
and the other’s jaw slackened. They were not staring at me in it, they were
looking at the pattern of firebirds chasing up and down intertwined vines with
little white flowers—queensblossom, it was called.

And it doesn’t grow anywhere on Earth.

One of the men exclaimed, “Sasharia Zhavalieshin?”

I hadn’t heard my real name for many years. “Wrong house.” I
winced against the headache.

“You have a look of your father,” the other man promptly
replied in a very strong accent—one I had worked hard to get rid of all those
years ago.

Again an exchange of glances, and one of them said, with a
furtive air, “We come with an offer.”

“A fabulous offer.” The other peeked furtively left and
right as though spies lurked in the palm trees and parked cars. “One might say,
of magical proportion . . .”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” I cut in. “So you’re trying
to tell me that there’s tremendous treasure waiting for me?”

Both heads nodded.

“If I take up a cause, one that includes deep magic?”

Vehement nodding.

“And perhaps an ancient castle full of sinister secrets?”

“Yes!”

“And all for truth, justice and honor?”

“Yes, yes!”

My anxiety flared into anger.

“Oh no you don’t,” I snarled. “I’ve been there, done that,
and they don’t even give you T-shirts.”

“Tee—”

“Shirts?”

“Let me make it plain. N-O, which in English—the language
you are using now—means no mystery offers, no fantastic treasure, no magic and
especially no causes. They hurt too much!”

And
then
I slammed
the door.

That is, I tried. One put his foot out, and the door thumped
into it. He gave a muffled “Ooof,” his eyes watering, and the tall gray one glanced
back over his shoulder yet again. Still no one there, if you didn’t count the
string of tightly parked cars belonging to the other tenants of the apartment
buildings on my street, and their roommates, boyfriends, girlfriends, and
whoever else could crowd in.

He turned back to me. “We must discuss your father. May we
enter?” Now he didn’t even speak English.

And though I hadn’t heard
that
language since I was a child, I understood it. Its cadences,
the clear, almost singsong vowels after the flat affect of American English
evoked so powerful a memory I froze. My throat hurt. “Is he dead? Just tell me.
Yes or no.”

“Please.” The tall one held out his hands. “We must discuss
your—your inheritance.”

My heart gave one of those knocks against the ribs that echoes
through body and soul with fear confirmed. With the pain of regret.

The younger one said quickly, “That is, we do not know for
certain that he is dead, and that is why we—”

So they don’t know,
either.
I pointed past their shoulders. “Whoa, the Winged Victory of
Samothrace!”

As they hadn’t read
Bored
of the Rings
, they peered skyward, shifting their weight as they did so.

This time I got the door to slam.

They pounded, of course, and I half expected them to blast
it inward with magic—then realized that if they could have, they already would
have. Magic, so untrustworthy on Earth, was on the ebb. They probably had just
enough access to whatever magical energy was floating over L.A. to return
through the World Gate.

So I hotfooted back to my room and slammed that door, too.

I flung myself onto my bed, which sloshed and undulated, but
even pulling the pillow over my head didn’t shut out the fact that at last, at
last, after all these years, what my mother had warned me about had come true.

They’d found me. Had they found Mom?

“Argh,” I croaked, my aching, sleep-deprived brain finally
catching up, and I sat up again, so sharply my head swam in a different
direction than the water bed undulated. “Oooogh.” My insides lurched along with
the sloshing water.

But I ignored that, too, and reached for my cell phone,
which I’d turned off before work the night before, and hadn’t turned back on as
my shift had ended at 3:30 a.m. I saw about a hundred calls from Mom. Uh-oh.

She answered on the first ring. “Darling?”

“Mom?”

“Sash! Oh babe, I am so relieved,” she exclaimed, as if a
month hadn’t gone by between our last fight and now. But then it was always
that way. After we cooled off we were too glad to hear the other’s voice to
continue whatever fight had sent me stomping off—Mom’s words usually echoing
behind me,
You’re too much like your
father: stubborn, dream-driven, won’t compromise—

“Mom—”

“Sasha.” I could hear her breathe. “
They found me
.”

“You too?”

“You—
you
too?” she
said, her voice too high with anxiety for either of us to laugh at the echo.

“Two old guys. Something about Dad and an inheritance. I
slammed the door in their faces. Mom, he isn’t, like, dead, is he? They
wouldn’t tell me. Or is it the Merindars, and some sort of trick?”

She heaved a shuddering sigh. “I don’t know,
chiquita.
The one I got was young, and
he isn’t any Merindar, unless Canary has mellowed in his old age. If he’s
aged.”

Canary was our private name for Canardan Merindar, usurper
to the throne of Khanerenth, on the world Sartorias-deles. It had once been a
funny name, meant to ease my fears while we were on the run, back before we’d
lost everything but one another.

Mom said urgently, “Look, I don’t want to get into this
stuff on the phone. It’s way too heavy-duty, and I don’t know what they can or
can’t do with magic and phones. Meet me . . . at the old place.
Okay?”

“Why not at your house? You’ve got those security guards and
everything—”

“And they got past. Roger’s in the middle of getting our
tickets, and we are gonna beat feet. But first I needed to talk to you.” Her
voice roughened, and I knew she’d been worried sick.

Filled with remorse, I nodded, remembered she couldn’t see
me, and said, “Give me five.”

In about a minute and a half, I’d dressed, grabbed my travel
bag, and jetted out the door.

o0o

“Five” in L.A. traffic is likelier to mean five hours than
minutes. An hour later, I’d inched my way across town through the morning
commuter traffic to the street we’d first lived on when we blasted back through
the World Gate with nothing more than the clothes we wore, a jumble of jewels
and keepsakes wrapped in my firebird bedspread, and each other.

My mother drove up from the opposite direction seconds after
I arrived in my battered old car. She had the door open almost before she’d
turned the engine off. Heads turned on the street as we flung ourselves into
the other’s arms. Even in L.A. you don’t often see a couple of women close to
six feet tall hugging—one blond and elegant in hand-tailored haute couture
clothes, the other in old jeans and a tee, a hawk’s beak of a nose, and
butt-length, wildly curly honey-colored hair.

“Sorry, sorry,” I muttered into her linen-covered shoulder.

“Sorry, darling,” she whispered into my hair.

We backed up to draw breath, caught some smiles and curious
glances from people on the sidewalk watching, and remembered why we’d come—I
could see it in her face as clearly as I was thinking it.

We looked around guiltily for lurking magical spies as we
crossed the dusty L.A. street, Mom whirling to beep her car locked. I didn’t
bother. No one would want to steal mine, even if they could get it running.

Our “place” was Dinah’s, an old fifties diner that
miraculously hadn’t been axed when the rest of the Bean Fields at the bottom of
Sepulveda and Centinela had sprouted into the Hughes Center. We asked for a
booth, and headed toward the far corner of the waiting area, me sitting so my
back was to the wall and two exits in sight.

Mom hadn’t forgotten Dad’s training. She’d been on the run
for several of my childhood years. What for me had been training had become
habit for my mother, the idealist hippie “performance art” chick who met a
prince from another world, and crossed with him back to his world.

Dad had never tried to fool her into thinking a “happily
ever after” awaited them. There were problems at home, and one of the reasons
Dad had left to visit Earth was to think about them, and perhaps to learn how
to cope. But my mother had always believed in good causes—even if her prince
looked a lot like Harpo Marx.

She said, “This kid came. Young. Your age, I’d think.”

I nodded. Comparing in years was almost meaningless between
a world with 365 days and one with 441 days.

“He told me your father had set something or other up, some
spell. If he wasn’t heard from in ten years, they were to activate this spell,
and it eventually led to us.”

She didn’t say
I told
you so
. She never did, and I had learned not to either. Our last fight had
been over my reluctance to move yet again. We’d run every year since we’d first
arrived, after Gramma died. We always returned to some part of L.A. School
after school, town after town, getting used to new kids, new rules, new clothes
and slang and styles—grammar school, middle school, high school, college.

I’d finally rebelled, declaring I would stay in L.A. and go
to graduate school. I’d been grimly slogging my way from work to school ever
since, but I had yet to learn to make and keep friends. I got along with
everyone I worked with. I just never got close.

She sighed. The waitperson behind the counter called out,
“Moira.”

We were soon sitting in a booth with drinks before us. I
hunched over my latte, stirring in sugar.

“Moira?” I asked.

“My latest name.” She made a face. “And yes, they found me
anyway.”

I didn’t say
Told you
so
either.

She sighed. “Okay. Roger is getting you a ticket as well. I
kept hoping you’d call, and I was going to wait until the last minute.”

“Where are you going?”

“New York.” That had been our last destination. She added
defensively, “Sash, we can get lost in New York City better than anywhere
else.”

“We can’t in
L.A.
?”
I waved a hand. “All right. Consider the argument already done, me saying how
much I hate running, you with the anonymity, me hating fake names and faker
people, you with safety, and me with the fact that we’re probably never going
to be safe. It looks like we’re unfinished business for those guys, and when it
comes to tech versus magic, guess who wins?”