Princess of Wands

by John Ringo

“Husband,” Barb said, looking at her unberinged finger. “And you’re sharing a room… ?”

  “Plenty of people do that at cons,” Candice replied. “It saves money. Don’t read anything else into it. Although… there’s other things that happen. But not with me,” she added, smiling. “I’ve got a great husband.”

  Barbara nodded and looked at her watch suddenly.

  “I’m going to wander,” she said, smiling. “Talk later?”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Candice said. “Enjoy yourself.”

  * * *

  “Hi, Sean,” Barb said as she saw the Wharf Rat coming out of one of the panels.

  “Hi,” the young man said, smiling broadly. His gaze flicked down to her chest and then forced itself back upwards. “We met last night, right?”

  “Yes,” Barbara replied. “Where are you headed?”

  “Nowhere right now,” Sean admitted. “There’s a panel in an hour I want to see on writing for art or market. I’m what I like to call an ‘aspiring author’ and most people call a ‘wannabe.’ “ He said the latter with a deprecating grin and Barb had to admit that he was rather attractive if a bit young for her. Maybe she should sic Janea on him. Then again, maybe not.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your break-up,” Barbara said, sadly. She had subtly shifted him over to some padded benches by the door to the atrium and now sat down, waving to the seat beside her.

  “I should have seen it coming,” Sean admitted, sitting down and looking at the far wall. “We’d been spending less and less time together and she always wanted to know when I was going to be home. Thursday was my range night; there’s an indoor range I go to and I usually went right from work to the range. But I’d forgotten to pack my guns so I went home to pick them up instead. And… there they were, right in our bed.”

  “I’m sorry,” Barb said, honestly.

  “I was, I thought, reasonably polite about it,” Sean said, looking over at her, then down to her chest, then back at the wall. “I just nodded at them, went in the closet, got out my gun bag and went back out. So when I got home, the police were waiting for me. I explained the situation, they politely took my guns away and explained that I couldn’t go back in my own apartment! I mean, it was my name on the lease! She moved out the next day and I moved back in.”

  “Did they give you the guns back?” Barbara asked, smiling slightly. The story had been told with a sort of blunt-instrument intensity that seemed to be natural rather than a result of the encounter. Sean was one of the most intense people she’d met in a very long time.

  “Yep,” Sean admitted. “But I had a hell of a job getting them clean; they’d been sitting uncleaned for a week.”

  “So what did you do then?” Barb asked.

  “Went back to work,” Sean said, shrugging. “I do remote installation on Internet lines. Mostly hardware work with some software troubleshooting. And the company does satellite uplink support, so I go out on those projects, too. It keeps me out of an office and mostly I’m working by myself. I don’t handle office politics very well. I guess I don’t really get along with most people.”

  “You seem to fit in here,” Barbara said, her eyes narrowing.

  “The Wharf Rats are sort of like an extended family,” Sean said, waggling his head from side to side. “And they’re mostly military oriented. They’re used to… military types. Civilians get all excited when you just tell them what to do and expect it to get done. They used to call me General Marshall when I was working tech support. So I don’t do tech support anymore. And being a field engineer pays better, anyway. Of course, it also meant I was out of town a lot. I’d guess that was one of the reasons… well…”

  “Yes. Well.” Barb said. “Do you mostly work in Virginia?”

  “Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio,” Sean said. “But things are looking up. I just got a promotion to shift supervisor so I’ll be spending more time close to home. More office time, too, but I can handle that.”

  “How’s the girlfriend front look?” Barbara asked, smiling.

  “Well, it’s looking up at the moment,” Sean said, smiling at her with a slight humorous leer. “Just joking. I’m not really looking for anything serious. I thought Annette was it. Now I’m not sure I trust women. Honestly, the whole thing with Annette really has me… disliking most females rather intensely. So I’m keeping what few encounters I have with them… limited in scope.” He looked over at her and shrugged. “You’re an obvious exception. You seem like a very nice lady. I’d say you remind me of my mother, but my mom’s a lot meaner. She and Dad were both Marines.”

  “Saying that a lady reminds you of your mom isn’t a compliment, anyway,” Barb pointed out acerbically.

  “I didn’t mean it that way!” Sean protested.

  “I understand,” Barbara said, laying a hand on his arm. She used the opportunity to get a quick read of him and wasn’t sure what she got. He definitely had some very dark areas, but no sniff of necromancy. “Well, thanks for talking to me. I think I’ll be seeing you at that panel. That’s the one with K. Goldberg on it, right?”

  “Yes,” Sean said, standing up. “I should say thanks. This has helped in a way.”

  “I’m glad,” Barb said, pausing. “Sean, women are as human and fallible as men. Some of them less so, some more so. Don’t… put all women in the same category as your ex-girlfriend. In fact, don’t be so quick to condemn her. Christ tells us to forgive. One of the reasons that he tells us to do so is that until we can forgive others, we cannot forgive ourselves. Until you can forgive Annette, and other women that have hurt you, it will be hard to let go of the darkness in your soul. And it’s eating you up.”

  Sean looked at her for a moment and then nodded.

  “You’re a very odd lady, Barbara,” Sean said, clearly puzzled.

  “So I’m told.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  The panel room had about twenty people in the audience and five members of the panel including Miz Goldberg, Folsom Duncan, Larry, the publisher from the slush party, David Krake and a redhead Barb didn’t recognize. It started by the five introducing themselves and the topic of the panel which was “Art or Marketing, How to Write.” The panel was moderated by the publisher she’d met last night and he opened the discussion.

  “You can write for market all you want,” Larry said. “But if you want to actually get published, you’d better be thinking of your writing as art or you’re never going to get a single thing into print. If you just throw the words down on paper, it invariably turns out to be crap.”

  “Larry, you’ve got your head so far up your ass you can see daylight through your throat,” Krake said, bluntly. “Bill Shakespeare didn’t give a damn about art. All he wanted was to get paid.”

  That more or less set the tone of the panel and it was a pretty aggressive discussion. Goldberg more or less sat it out, only softly contributing that she thought art was important but so was getting paid and the two weren’t necessarily the same. Duncan felt that being superior in art was useful and he admired those who could write artfully but he just enjoyed telling the story and worried about “style and that” as a distant last after plot and characters. The fifth panel member, the redheaded woman, was firmly on the side of art but stated her position in such a garbled manner Barbara wasn’t sure she could compose a sentence much less a story. She also spent better than half her time promoting her writer’s workshop.

  Krake, however, wasn’t hard to understand at all. He stated that anyone who thought first of “art” “might get published but only once and then get dumped into the trash bin.” Oh, and they were “flaming idiots” who would spend their lives “wandering from con to con teaching writing instead of actually trying the hard work of doing it.” The last might or might not have been pointed at the redheaded woman, but whether it was or not she looked poisonous at the comment.

  Krake also had a bug up his butt about somebody named Robert who apparently wrote fantasy. Fantasy that was
not, in the opinion of most of the panel members, very good. But it did, apparently, sell well, much to their chagrin. That was about the only point on which Krake and Larry the Publisher could agree. Actually, Krake, Larry and the redhead all agreed that this Robert fellow should have his fingers broken. Duncan and Goldberg were somewhat more restrained, Duncan making the point that you couldn’t support market forces and then ignore them when they disagreed with your taste.

  She wasn’t sure what she was doing in the panel audience. She supposed that she should be observing her fellow audience members and trying to spot a suspect, but she didn’t have any idea what to look for. More than half the people in the room were male, most of them with brown hair. And she couldn’t tell who was a Goldberg fan and who was there to see the others. Some of the men she’d pegged as possible Goldberg fans seemed to be there to see Larry the Publisher and most of the rest seemed to be there to see the other male panelists. She finally realized that she and a couple of other females were the only ones interested in hearing Miz Goldberg’s opinion.

  Of the five, however, she had to admit that the one she liked the most was probably Duncan. When he spoke he had an aura of authority. He never seemed to cut people down, except in the most humorous way, and when he spoke people tended to fall silent. The term she was looking for was “charisma.” He wasn’t particularly handsome or dominating, but he had a gift for presenting things in ways that people could understand and enjoy listening to. She thought he would have made a great teacher. A few of the people present seemed to absolutely loathe him and she wasn’t sure why. It wasn’t what they said, the questions they asked, but how they said it. Most of the rest, those who clearly were his “fans” and others who clearly didn’t know him very well, however, seemed to really enjoy hearing his thoughts.

  After the panel she waited to talk to him again. He was listening to a young man talk about one of his books. Barb couldn’t make heads or tails of what they were talking about and the young man… wasn’t charismatic. He tended to stutter and repeat himself but Duncan simply nodded and seemed honestly interested in what he was saying, even smiling at a couple of very lame attempts at jokes on the part of the fan. She realized that was part of what made him so interesting; he had the ability to listen as well as talk. To really listen and pay attention to what the other person was saying, to make reasonable comments that proved he was paying attention and cared about what was being said. She’d dealt with a few people who were relatively famous and they tended to only hear their own words and thoughts. It was clear that however well known Duncan was, and he was clearly famous at least within this group, he hadn’t let it go entirely to his head.

  “You were very interesting on the panel,” Barbara said when the young man walked away clutching his signed book.

  “I’ve got the Irish gift of gab,” Duncan said, shrugging. “It’s not much more than that.”

  “Duncan’s not an Irish name,” Barb pointed out, smiling.

  “Well, it’s from my mother’s side,” Duncan replied. “You didn’t say much in the panel.”

  “I didn’t know what to say, or ask,” Barbara said. “I’m sorry, I haven’t read any of your books.”

  “I always have a book for a beautiful lady,” he said, taking his computer bag off his shoulder and dipping into it. The cover of the book he handed her mostly consisted of a large-breasted blonde holding two large guns. The model didn’t know how to hold a weapon, either.

  “Nice cover,” Barb said, dryly.

  “They sell books,” Duncan said, shrugging again. “The core market, as I said, is males. Sex sells. This offends the hell out of those who think that the world should be perfectly PC and males shouldn’t care. That is not, however, reality.”

  “You didn’t add ‘unfortunately,’ “ Barbara said, flipping open the cover and glancing at the blurbs.

  “That is because I am not PC,” Duncan said, smiling broadly. “I like women to be women and men to be men. There are differences. Women who try to outdo males just to outdo males, who get all up in arms at having a door opened for them, who think males should think like women, and who get terribly upset at my covers, I think are… less than they could be. I think even less of the males who fall for their arguments.”

  “You don’t like the modern ‘urban male,’ “ Barb said.

  “I think that telling men that they should be women leads to most of the problems we’re dealing with these days,” Duncan replied, arching an eyebrow. “Males respond, by and large, to arguments that feminists despise. That women should be treated as special and specially protected. That it’s a male’s duty to be the first line of protection and that there’s a reason for ‘women and children first’ in a lifeboat situation. That honor and duty and loyalty are good traits and should be encouraged. Males are expendable, women are not. That may not be PC, but it’s how I feel and, demonstrably, more males respond to that sort of reasoning than ones that are essentially feminine. At the same time, women should be allowed to be whoever they are, without either males or females telling them who they should be. If a women is a superior warrior, then let her do her thing. If she’s sensitive and caring and unable to do battle, then let her do what she is called to. Ditto males. But don’t say that males should be sensitive and caring. Most of us are lousy at it no matter how hard we try. Males tend to make lousy women. Don’t create boxes and say ‘This is who you must be.’ Especially don’t create boxes that are designed counter to the way that most men and women truly feel. Feminists created Eminem and now they’re getting what they asked for, whether they realize it or not.”

  “Strangely enough, I agree with most of that,” Barbara said, considering it carefully. “So what’s this book about?”

  “Magic and dragons,” Duncan said, shrugging. “Actually, that series isn’t going all that well. I’d thought that it would really sell, both because my other series sold so well and because the big market is high-sales fantasy. But it’s just limping. I swear I’d sell my soul to get it off the ground!”

  “You’re a very odd person, Folsom Duncan,” Barb said, frowning slightly at the expression.

  “Ain’t I then?” Duncan said, grinning. “Check your assumptions at the door, as Lois Bujold would say.”

  Barbara blinked for a moment and then sighed.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “For what?” Duncan asked.

  “It’s… hard to explain,” she said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  * * *

  “What’s so important?” Janea asked when she met Barb in the lobby followed by Greg.

  “Timson,” Barbara said. “You said that he knows a lot about the occult. Right?”

  “He’s blond,” Janea said, realizing where she was going right away.

  “That’s what dye is for,” Barb pointed out, sharply.

  “No, he’s blond,” Janea said, definitely. “Trust me on that one.”

  “Oh,” Barbara said. “Damn.”

  “Nice try, though,” Greg said. “I’m starting to agree with Janea that it’s probably a LARPer.”

  “I’d already considered him, though,” Janea admitted. “And rejected him for just that reason.”

  “So what do we have?” Greg asked.

  “I’m looking at motive and opportunity, I guess,” Barb said. “There are several of the Wharf Rats that meet the criteria for suspects. Also a couple of people around Larry Whatsisname, the magazine publisher. One being Larry. Baron and Sean both have jobs that move them around the state and both have ties to Ohio.”

  “The body that they found there,” Janea said, nodding.

  “Sean’s got a real case of the bums at women at the moment,” Barbara continued. “He found his live-in girlfriend in bed with another man and then she took out a restraining order on him. So he’s not very happy with women right now. Baron’s… well, he’s more or less what I thought we were looking for. Not very socially apt, so having the power to compel women would probably be a
ttractive to him. Both of them travel a good bit for their jobs. Eric and Larry both travel. Eric’s married, admittedly, but I’m not sure that discounts him. And he’s ambitious. Demons can tinker with earthly powers to aid in ambition. Larry… I just don’t like. But he also fits the profile.”

  “There are at least six of the LARPers that fit the profile as well,” Janea said. “But not Timson. And from what I’ve gleaned about the Wharf Rats, I’d put Sean and Baron high on the list of suspects.”

  “I’m interested in Duncan as well,” Barb said. “He has something very strange about his… soul. He’s like a power sink or something. If Remolus is a power absorber, then I’d expect his touch to be something like what Duncan has.”

  “That’s… outside my territory,” Greg said. “But don’t get caught up on motivation and opportunity. Or clues. Before you know it, you’ll decide that it was done by a one-legged butler in the library or something.”

  “I wish there was some way to go around getting DNA from all these suspects,” Barbara said, then paused, looking thoughtful.

  “Ain’t gonna do it,” Janea said, shaking her head.

  “It wouldn’t take all that long,” Greg said, grinning. He had another hickey on the other side of his neck.

  “Says you, Flash,” Janea replied, shaking her head. “Some people take more than thirty seconds.”

  “Hey!”

  “You don’t know what I was thinking,” Barb protested.

  “Bet you a dollar?” Janea said. “Ain’t gonna do it. What got you on Timson, anyway?”

  “Somebody said to check your assumptions,” Barbara said. “Timson was such a nice guy, I wondered if it was all an act.”

  “Oh, it’s a good bit act,” Janea said, fondly. “He can be a very bad boy if you know what I mean.”

  “That wasn’t quite where I was going,” Barb said, tartly.

  “Why’s it always about bad boys?” Greg said, sighing.

  “I’m not sure what or who we’re looking for,” Janea said, seriously. “It could be one of the guys at the con that’s popular and can pick up the girls. Or it might be one who seems to be a total loser on the surface and is using power to attract them.”