Wicked Bronze Ambition

by Glen Cook

  “He was wrong.”

  “In so many ways. But that’s behind us. That’s all settled. Talk to me about Hagekagome. Who is she? What is she? How can she possibly be so devoted to me, and have those stories about our wonderful times together, while I have no clue? I’ve never suffered egregious and persistent memory loss. And how can she be only this old if she’s been pushed forward in time? If Strafa got younger?” Fact, though. The girl had been gaining on Penny, fast, from the moment she attacked me.

  And my own Strafa didn’t get younger, did she? My own Strafa got dead. Little Strafa was a whole different creature. So why shouldn’t Hagekagome be a whole different creature, too?

  But . . . ? Different from?

  Orchidia made a joke. “Dog years.”

  “Huh?”

  Penny hadn’t contributed much but awed responses to the flash and bang over yonder, so far. Now she found a reserve of daring, leaned her cheek against my arm, and said, “Hey, Hage!”

  Must have been a game they’d made up. Hagekagome responded, “Hey, Dread!” Sleepily.

  “Hey, Kage! Who is that boy that you’re in love with?”

  “Mikey Garrett. Hey, Dread! Who is that man . . . ?”

  The game went a couple of rounds more. I lost it, becoming frozen in a moment.

  Hagekagome tightened her grip even more when she said my brother’s name.

  All the evidence was there.

  I plummeted into the deep, dark well of my mind, headed down and away further than I’d ever fallen before.

  119

  The roar over the river kept me from getting lost.

  Game over! became an anchoring thought, though it made no sense in the circumstances.

  I could not interrogate Hagekagome, or anyone else, because of the racket from the waterfront. The fireworks guys were moving toward their big finale. That looked likely to roll on longer and louder than ever, thanks to the generosity of Karenta’s Royal Army.

  Mikey. Hagekagome had confused me with my little brother. No one had yet convinced her that she was wrong.

  How hard had anyone tried? Had anyone, other than Penny, even worked that part out?

  Hagekagome being misinformed helped explain why I didn’t know her. Mikey had had time for a girlfriend or three after I went off to war. But that didn’t explain why I thought I should know her name. I was sure that I’d heard it before. Neither Mikey nor Mom had been the sort to write letters. Neither had been the sort to afford a scrivener and the post, nor had any mad need to communicate ever befallen them. I wouldn’t have heard about a girlfriend from a letter.

  Too, Playmate knew the name. He must have heard it before he went to the war zone. Mikey was gone before Play got back.

  Maybe Mom mentioned Hagekagome after I came home, during the short while that I had her—mainly as an emotional sparring partner. She hadn’t been able to get her mind around the fact that I was a grown-ass man who had survived the ugliest that the world could fling at me and no longer ought to be treated like a slow eight-year-old.

  Even with all the information at hand, I kept missing the last point. I knew I had it all. I just couldn’t look at it from the right angle, despite a lifetime spent in this bizarre city. Despite a civilian career spent eyeball-to-eyeball with the mystical, supernatural, implausible, and sometimes downright logically impossible. After having dealt with several varieties of ghosts and undead. After having coped with gods and demons, devils and giant insects, and intelligent fungi. After having battled shape-shifters, racialists, coin collectors, vintners, and similarly fantastic creatures, I still failed to see the obvious. The simplest explanation. The step right out of folklore obvious once my lady companions piled on the hints. But I could call an excuse: Hagekagome was neither a fox nor a crane.

  Moonblight sighed. “My forehead is getting sore, being banged against a wall . . . But time flies. Midnight has gone. The slide has begun. It could go very fast now. I have no choice, however much you all want to nudge and hint so he can work it out for himself.”

  Hagekagome held on to me even harder than she had been. I glanced down. Moonblight made a jewel of a tear in the corner of her eye. Several dogs had crowded in close to her, including all four who had gone adventuring with me. Brownie had turned in my lap and now extended overboard enough to rest her chin on Hagekagome’s right thigh.

  More than anything, I was having trouble getting past the fact that Hagekagome thought that I was Mikey. Poor child, to be so wondrously beautiful, yet so dim.

  Little Strafa’s fingers on my shoulders now shivered constantly.

  Moonblight asked, “Are you being willfully slow? I’ve heard that you often pretend to possess the reasoning capacity of a twenty-year-old stump.”

  “I’ll stipulate the incapacity but not that I’m doing it on purpose. I’m the most frustrated one here. I know that I should get it. I know that I keep looking at it wrong.”

  “For goodness’ sake,” Orchidia said. “Your brother brought home strays . . .”

  And Bang! The last great barrage began, lighting the city brighter than day. And Bang! The truth exploded inside my head. The implausible, impossible truth.

  I remembered where I’d heard the name Hagekagome.

  Mikey had brought home a sweet, beautiful little black-and-white stray not even old enough to wean. She had been in bad shape. Thunder lizards had had her cornered when he intervened. She had lived at our house for a while because even hardhearted Mom hadn’t been able to make such a loving, pretty, and badly injured little thing “run away” before she was well enough to make it on her own.

  She hadn’t been my pup, my friend. She had been as devoted to Mikey as any dog could be. But even I had shed some tears when Hakekagome wasn’t with us anymore.

  Mikey had named her that, making the name up from words he had learned from a foreign trader kid he met on the waterfront. It had something to do with a game like hide-and-seek that he learned about from the foreigner—who might have been a girl, his first infatuation. He spent a lot of time on the wharfs for a while.

  Of course, that was me thinking. I am the one who sees all history in terms of the females involved.

  That Hagekagome spent a summer and part of an autumn with us. She and Mikey had done all those things she told Penny about. But then my cousin Gesic came home missing an eye, an ear, an arm, and a leg, and there had been no one else to care for him during his remaining days. We couldn’t support Gesic and a dog, too. Even Mom cried—and had enough emotion invested that she insisted Mikey had to deal with this one himself. How grim he became! My little brother, always so cheerful before, was never the same afterward. Always glum, never smiling.

  I now knew how he had resolved the cold equation. He had taken Hagekagome to a place where wild dogs lived and left her with them. And she had not found her way home. Or she had understood well enough to know that, no matter what, home could no longer be there. So, because she loved Mikey so much, she made his life easier by choosing not to follow him.

  I got misty just thinking about it.

  I hugged Hagekagome back so hard that Strafa began to growl.

  I would never tell Hagekagome that she had confused me with my brother. Never.

  I knew what all this meant now. That of all the nights of my life, this would be the saddest. A massively stupid error by a sorceress with good but mad intentions had collided with an old kernel of pain and had breathed in life that belonged to my wife-to-be, without intent, accidentally, and agonizingly cruel.

  I couldn’t get tangled up in the mechanisms of how and why. I just accepted the fact that a cute dog who had loved my brother had come back as an incredibly beautiful, if not very bright, young girl who also loved Mikey with canine depth and commitment.

  I could accept that because I had been chin-to-chin with strange stuff throughout my career. I expected the strange to keep right on, heading down the road, unless Strafa’s death did what Tinnie Tate’s incessant nagging had failed to accom
plish, which was to break me down.

  Truth. I didn’t have to get into these things if I wanted to avoid them. I had the gigs with the brewery and Amalgamated. I had inherited wealth, little as I wanted that. I no longer had any need to work. I could sell the business to Singe. She was sure to make a raving success of it, with never a drop of blood being shed. If I felt compelled to hit the mean streets looking for an ass-kicking or head-thumping, I could always sign on with Prince Rupert.

  I was going to have to learn to swim in rare social waters, like it or not. That was one cost of having become involved with Furious Tide of Light. Her being gone would not excuse me from being Mr. Furious Tide.

  My grandmother-in-law, if no one else, would make sure I was out in front from now on, the curtain behind which the more bizarre crew lurked. Me. Garrett. The mask of normalcy disguising the Algarda tribe.

  I glanced back at Little Strafa. Her hands had become shakier. Maybe it was just the intense moonlight, but she also seemed to have developed a deathly pallor.

  Hagekagome had become a little more shaky, too. Her grip on my arm seemed almost desperate. She panted like an overheated or frightened pup. Brownie and her friends were restless, too. Number Two emitted the occasional doleful whine.

  An old childhood story, based on legend or rural folklore, told of a fox girl who fell in love so deeply that the local gods gave her permission to take human form to be with the man she loved. The catch—and there is always a nasty one where gods are involved—was that it could be only for a short time, and then she would die. But so deep was her love that she made that choice, trading a long magical life—foxes being magical as well as natural creatures—for the brief time she got to share with the one she loved.

  I found a part of me thinking I should mention that story to Jon Salvation next time we got together. It would make a sweet tragedy. Only it would be like him to throw in some ugly commentary on his own bleak species by having the human lover just shove the fox girl aside after she sacrificed everything, maybe going after some bimbo with enormous hooters instead.

  Penny said, “We should do something besides just sit here talking. Time is not our friend. It’s almost up for Hage.”

  And of course, Garrett, the ultrasensitive wonder child that he is, absolutely conformed to the negative expectations of his female companions despite having had his nose rubbed in the fact that Hagekagome and Little Strafa were part of a twisted real-world iteration of the tale of the fox girl, thanks to the efforts of various less than competent sorcerers.

  Singe launched a sigh of exasperation. “Is your brain made of cheese? Or chert? They are going to go, Garrett. And it won’t be long. The process has begun.”

  Hagekagome was shivering badly now. “I’m so cold,” she whispered. “I’m so sad. I don’t want to leave you.”

  Boy genius that I am, my first impulse was to ask, “Little Strafa, too?” instead of answering Hagekagome’s need. A whole murder of crow women read me beforehand. Snarls, hisses, and growls came at me from every angle, slowing me down. Making me pause long enough to digest what Hagekagome had said, so I was able to respond with a satisfactory “I’ll always be with you, Little One. I’ll always have you in my heart, till we’re together again.”

  It didn’t seem possible, but she squeezed my arm even tighter. She was shaking even more. I told her, “Don’t be afraid. You were always a good girl.”

  “I’m not afraid. I just don’t want to leave you.”

  Penny got up and came around to Hagekagome’s other side, moving Orchidia to do it. She glommed on to the pretty girl, tight. “Hey, Hage.”

  “Hey, Dread.”

  Brownie made a whining noise. So did Number Two. Orchidia and Little Strafa repositioned themselves so they could both contribute warmth from behind.

  Hagekagome hit me once, weakly, over the heart, with her left fist as she forced her way over to rest her left cheek against my chest. Her big brown eyes sparkled in the moonlight, diamond tears. “I love you. I love you more than anything.”

  And then she closed those beautiful eyes.

  120

  There was a disconnect in reality for a moment, like there was a one-half-second fade to black that might, in truth, have lasted a thousand years or an entire cycle of the universe. When it was over I had another dog in my lap, an ancient black-and-white female who had to have set a record for life span in dog years. All the strays pushed in around me, sniffing, whimpering, and giving her face good-bye licks.

  At that moment I decided I would honor Mikey’s love by laying Hagekagome down beside my own love. She would have a fine funeral, too.

  We were entering a season of funerals. We had to see off Kyoga’s son, Orchidia’s twins, and the marvelous Mashego. And maybe Vicious Min as well. We hadn’t heard anything more there.

  John Stretch would report.

  I had a more immediate concern.

  Strafa clung to my back as fiercely as Hagekagome had clung to my arm, shaking. “Tara Chayne, Orchidia, I don’t think I can survive losing her again.”

  Moonblight responded, “You can handle this. You’re a grown man. A war veteran. You’re just tired and feeling sorry for yourself. Hike up your big boy britches and get on with it.”

  There she went, kicking me into the land of what the hell is going on? again.

  Orchidia suggested, “Time is less friendly than we thought only an hour ago. The dog girl reverted sooner and faster than I expected.”

  So Little Strafa’s time might come sooner, too.

  Singe asked, “What can we expect?”

  “More of that.” Orchidia indicated Hagekagome. The old dog looked sad in the moonlight. Strays looked at me like they thought I should do something.

  Looking at Brownie, Number Two, and the others I saw something I’d missed till now. These were Hagekagome’s children. Well, more remote descendants than that, probably. But she was their beloved and honored matriarch and they had shown her to her heart’s desire before she’d had to leave them.

  I levered my stiff old bones upright. I needed help. It had been a long day, yet there remained more day to be lived.

  I lifted Hagekagome. She was heavier than I expected. I headed downhill. The Algarda Mausoleum lay just over a hundred yards distant. Moonlight painted the graveyard crisply spooky. Everybody, dogs and all, came along.

  Little Strafa crowded me as tightly as Hagekagome had earlier, grimly aware that she was running out of time.

  She was not comfortable with it, the way Hagekagome had been. For a time there had seemed to be a chance of living to grow up and become the wife . . . But that hope had gone. She wanted to kick and scream and fight, but there was no throat to wrap her little fingers round.

  We were halfway to the mausoleum when Tara Chayne delivered a heartfelt rendition of “Oh, shit!” while looking back upslope.

  The big guy stood where we had sat watching fireworks. Where Hagekagome had left us. He spotted Little Strafa, boomed a question loudly enough to waken babies a mile away.

  That would bring the sextons out.

  I told Strafa, “You’re the only one who can handle this.”

  She stopped to wait while the parade moved on. A minute later I found myself developing a grudge. The mausoleum remained as we had left it earlier, open to anyone daring enough to disturb the dead during All-Souls.

  I passed Hagekagome to Orchidia, eased inside, found the lamps, fired them up, then went back for Hagekagome.

  Jiffy stood calmly and respectfully out of the way, Little Strafa holding his hand. She was calmer now.

  I swapped a lamp for Hagekagome, carried her inside. Orchidia lighted my way. Tara Chayne followed. Brownie came, too, the only mutt with courage enough to enter. Singe and Penny chose to stay outside.

  I placed Hagekagome on the available plinth. I was teary again. Orchidia drifted to the doorway, bellowed at Little Strafa to get her butt in here; her presence was required.

  Strafa did not comply.

>   I couldn’t help myself. I swept dust off the glass between me and my wife, raised my lamp for a final sorrow-filled look . . .

  Trick of the lamplight, Strafa seemed to have gained some color.

  An outcry rose outside, Penny and Singe both shouting for me, “Now!”

  Little Strafa was having a seizure. Jiffy had her in his massive arms, controlling her, but was at a loss over what else to do. He passed her to me the instant I was close enough; then he just stood there looming with wet cheeks.

  The violence of Strafa’s seizure waned to a bad case of the shakes. She opened her eyes for a moment, slammed her arms around my neck, and squeezed till it felt like she might break something.

  I settled to the grass and held her. There was nothing else I could do. Nothing I could think to do. Penny and Singe tried to comfort me.

  Little Strafa’s shakes weakened. She opened her eyes one last time, forced a sad smile, touched my cheek with the tips of the fingers of her left hand, whispered, “Love you. Forever.”

  She stopped shaking. She stopped breathing. Then, a few minutes later, she stopped being.

  There was another of those fade-to-black moments, after which we all gawked at my empty lap.

  Jiffy went somewhere to be alone with his pain.

  I sat there amid family and dogs and wandered off into the lost realm that had been so attractive lately.

  Murmuring and shuffling brought me back.

  Orchidia and Tara Chayne were easing out of the tomb, a sagging but breathing grown-up Strafa suspended between them, too weak to lift her chin.

  I took a quick look eastward before I rushed in.

  No. We didn’t get to add dawn light to the drama. Not yet.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Glen Cook was born in 1944 in New York City. He has served in the United States Navy and lived in Columbus, Indiana; Rocklin, California; and Columbia, Missouri, where he went to the state university. He attended the Clarion Writers Workshop in 1970, where he met his wife, Carol. “Unlike most writers, I have not had strange jobs like chicken plucking and swamping out health bars. Only full-time employer I’ve ever had is General Motors.” He is now retired from GM. He’s “still a stamp collector and book collector, but mostly, these days, I hang around the house and write.” He has three sons—an army officer, an architect, and a music major.