The Iron Druid Chronicles 6-Book Bundle
Page 178
All right, buddy, time to be on your best behavior. Sit up and don’t move. Follow Granuaile’s lead.
He posed like a show dog, perfectly still except for his tail, which swished madly across the grass.
“Hello, Oberon,” Granuaile said aloud, clearly for the owner’s benefit. Dog owners were used to people talking to dogs and wouldn’t find it strange. “This lovely lady is Orlaith. Would you like to say hello?”
Oberon gave a short bark of affirmation, but mentally he said,
Granuaile must have answered him, for there was a pause before he said,
Orlaith approached, nose aquiver and tail sawing the air, and Oberon rose to his feet, similarly enthused. He was very patient as she snuffled all around his face, and then she did a quick once-over of his torso before sliding down to his posterior.
Granuaile laughed and looked at me. “She likes him.”
I grinned and nodded. It was pretty obvious from the hound’s behavior, but it was good to have confirmation of Orlaith’s feelings from Granuaile. I would be very careful not to tap into Orlaith’s head for a few weeks, to make sure she bonded properly with Granuaile.
Oberon heard the comment, of course, and said,
I asked Granuaile, “Do you think you’ll get along with her?”
“Oh, yes, no problem,” she replied. “Orlaith’s quick and very sweet.”
Oberon broke out of the circle and took off across the lawn, Orlaith hot on his heels.
The owner of the ranch chuckled and said, “Well, they certainly seem to get along.”
Granuaile clapped her hands together in delight and gave a little squee. “Yes, they do. We’d like to adopt her if that’s okay.” She introduced me to the woman, who was named Kimberly. Her mother had owned the ranch during the time I’d adopted Oberon, and now she looked after it. We couldn’t tell her Oberon had ever been there, of course, because he was far older than any normal wolfhound now. But we could show Kimberly that we were pretty good with hounds.
Oberon, come on over here and be brilliant for a second so this lady will trust us with Orlaith. Aloud I said, “Oberon! Here, boy!”
“Sit,” I said. He sat. “Lie down.” He did so. “Belly rub.” He rolled onto his back.
No worries. “Come to heel.” He got up and moved to my right side, facing the same way I was facing, and wagged his tail. Orlaith did the same thing with Granuaile, standing on her left side, though Granuaile hadn’t said anything aloud.
Kimberly let out a low whistle of appreciation. “Well, I guess you know your hounds,” she said.
We filled out paperwork with Kimberly and made a generous donation to the rescue, then we left with Orlaith and shifted through Tír na nÓg to our cabin in Colorado, where Orlaith would have plenty of time to bond with Granuaile and begin to learn a few words here and there.
You’ll need to be very patient with Orlaith on the talking thing, I explained to Oberon. You’ve been with me many years now and probably don’t remember how tough it was at first.
When Granuaile thinks she’s ready. It will probably be a while, buddy. Bonding them too soon might overwhelm Orlaith, and I needed to remember to remind Granuaile of that. You can just enjoy her as she is in the meantime, right?
The days passed quickly with training and play until it was time to travel back to Tír na nÓg. I’d asked Hal Hauk to start liquidating some of my assets and converting them to gold, and one of his pack members, Greta, was tasked with delivering it to the cabin. It was her second trip there—a rather long one from Tempe—and she made it clear that she hated the drive. She turned her car around on the road and honked, never getting out. Once I walked around to the driver’s side, she rolled down the window and dropped a heavy sack on the ground in front of me.
“A giant bag of gold I can understand, but making me drive up here to deliver those Girl Scout Cookies and whiskey? That makes you a whole new species of asshole,” she said, then stepped on the accelerator and peeled down the hill, leaving me in a cloud of dust. I coughed a bit but grinned. I knew what to get her for the holidays. I hefted the sack and, after bidding farewell to Granuaile and the hounds, took it with me to pay Goibhniu and thereby finance the stealth war against vampires.
When I got there and paddled the canoe out to Zealot Island, Goibhniu had already extracted its inhabitant from the slow time and placed him on a makeshift bed on the barge. In keeping with his promise to the Morrigan, he’d called in Fand, who was leaning over the man, lending her healing powers and the miraculous bacon of Manannan Mac Lir’s hogs to his recuperation—for, as expected, he had broken quite a few bones in the shock of removal. She smiled as I approached and said, “Ah, here he is! Your savior. I’ll let you two talk.” She winked at me and whispered, “He’s doing very well considering his age, even with our help.” Her surprise and curiosity about his identity were unspoken but clear.
It wasn’t a mystery to me why he healed so fast, but I felt it best to keep his identity a secret for a while longer. Ignoring her nonverbal query, I simply said, “Thank you.” She complimented my new haircut with a faint trace of sarcasm and took the hint, leaving us alone.
A weathered visage underneath a pair of bushy white eyebrows scowled at me in querulous confusion, one gloved hand holding up to his mouth a strip of bacon, which he gnawed on with gusto. He was having trouble placing me—my haircut was quite severe. I’d had to shave my head because most of the hair on the left side had been torn out by the tooth faeries, and now there was only a couple weeks’ stubble showing. His curt voice was laced with irritation as he spat in Old Irish, “Say something, y’poxy pile of shite.” A small chunk of bacon launched itself from his teeth by way of punctuation.
Normally, such a greeting would elicit from me an assertion that I had enjoyed the company of his mother the previous evening, but, considering who it was, I toned it down a bit. “The good news is that you’re still alive after all these years. The bad news is that you’re still alive after all these years.”
The eyebrows writhed in sinuous fashion atop his brow, wrestling for dominance on his face, until recognition hit him and they drew together in their customary configuration, a severe roof over an angry grimace. “You? Bloody Siodhachan!” Little bacon-flavored flecks of spittle flew from his lips. Deciding this wasn’t enough, he hawked up something gross and spat on the deck before continuing, “Gods damn it, how long was I on that thrice-cursed island? Nobody will tell me. You’ve gone and cocked everything up again, haven’t ye?”
My old archdruid literally hadn’t aged a day since the Morrigan put him on the island, and he was still as
charming as ever.
For the Confederacy of Nerds:
AK, Barushka, Alan, Tooth,
and Pilot John
Acknowledgments
In case you might be interested, I’ve included a couple of goodies on my website (www.kevinhearne.com) that couldn’t appear in the book. The first is a Google map of the run across Europe. The second is a much longer retelling of The Wooing of Étaín by Atticus. Links to both can be found on the appropriately titled Goodies page.
Special thanks to Colin Wagenmann in Germany for his insights regarding German geography and for expressing existential quantification in Deutsch. I’m also grateful to Michelle Drew and William Cathcart in the UK for info regarding Windsor Park and Frogmore House, and to Heather Blatt at Florida International University for her invaluable help with Middle English. Dr. D. Forrest Taylor coached me a bit on toxins and their effects. Any inaccuracies are of course my fault and not theirs.
To belay speculation, the similarity betwixt my surname and Herne the Hunter’s is entirely coincidental—unless it isn’t. I know my ancestor arrived in “the Colonies” in the sixteenth century from London and could conceivably be related to an historical Herne (if he existed), but I lay no claim to that and frankly think it far-fetched. I simply found Herne a fascinating and irresistible figure because he illustrates the principle that stories (and perhaps gods) can take on a life of their own.
I cannot say enough good things about my alpha reader, Alan O’Bryan, my agent, Evan Goldfried, and my editors at Del Rey, Tricia Narwani and Mike Braff. Words simply fail, so we tend to drink a lot and sing the praises of a literate populace. Seriously. We’re not bad singers. And we have sung songs about you. Someday we will form our own heavy metal band called Thë Grätüïtöüs Ümläüts and sing of death and linguistics. Our first single will be “(Die)acriticäl Märks.”
Many thanks to you for reading and for spreading word of the series to your friends. It’s the only reason I get to write more.
Last but certainly not least, I’m grateful to my family for their love and support.
From New York Times bestselling author
KEVIN HEARNE
The Iron Druid Chronicles:
HOUNDED • HEXED
HAMMERED • TRICKED
TRAPPED • HUNTED
The Iron Druid Chronicles eNovellas:
TWO RAVENS AND ONE CROW
GRIMOIRE OF THE LAMB
www.KevinHearne.com
Twitter.com/KevinHearne
Facebook.com/AuthorKevin
Grimoire of the Lamb is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A Del Rey eBook Original
Copyright © 2013 by Kevin Hearne
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States of America by Del Rey, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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eISBN: 978-0-345-54829-0
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v3.1_r1
Contents
Master Table of Contents
Grimoire of the Lamb
Title Page
Copyright
First Page
People today think ancient Egypt was ineffably cool. I blame this misconception on hieroglyphics and (to a lesser extent) on the Bangles.
The truth is that the ancient Egyptians regarded most people as chattel for the ruling class and practiced some of the blackest magic history has ever seen—or, rather, hasn’t seen, because they were deadly serious about keeping their secrets. But they wrote such happy tomes as The Book of the Dead and illustrated joyful kids’ books like Little Scarab Shat Blood and Anubis Eats the Hearts of the Disobedient. I’m not kidding; I saw them before the Library of Alexandria was ruined by Emperor Aurelian.
I saw plenty at Alexandria in its heyday. In fact, I saw quite a few things I never should have seen, which is why I now avoid the country when I can. My logic, if it could be called that, suggests that if I never think about the country again, the old deities of Egypt will forget that I once snaffled their sex rituals and necromantic tomes. Calls from Cairo, therefore, automatically excite more than their fair share of suspicion. When I picked up the phone in my shop and the voice in my ear identified himself as “Nkosi Elkhashab from Egypt,” I toyed briefly with the idea of hanging up before he could even state his business.
The problem was this: Long ago—in what I suppose I must now call my “youth,” even though I was already a couple of hundred years old at the time—I raided an extremely restricted section at Alexandria. It was at the behest of Ogma, one of the Tuatha Dé Danann, so to please that particular god I wound up vexing several others in the Egyptian pantheon. Not so much that they would take the trouble to hunt me down, but neither am I precisely welcome in their territory anymore. Bast, in particular, has several bones to pick with me, aside from the fact that I’m not a cat person. I have a book of hers—or, rather, a book that belonged to her cult—that contains some fairly lurid descriptions of her “mysteries.” It is physical evidence of the old saying that there is more than one way to skin a cat: The parchment itself is made of catskin—a fine quality bordering on vellum—and the cover is a thicker, tanned catskin leather to protect the contents from minor water damage. I’d thwarted a couple of attempts by her agents to steal it back or assassinate me, but I could also say the same for most of my Egyptian collection. Almost all of it had been cursed or enchanted in some fashion and had given me more trouble than it was worth. I held on to it now just to be stubborn, to say “Neener neener!” to all those ancient mages and gods who thought they could scare a Druid into giving away his hard-earned (if ill-gotten) library. I tended to hoard magical tomes the way dragons hoarded treasure—and protected them with the same ferocity.
Mr. Elkhashab, however, wanted what amounted to a cookbook. “If you are the rare-book dealer Atticus O’Sullivan …?”
“I am.”
“Then I am told you have a collection of extremely rare works from Egypt,” he said, his voice rich with the lilt of an Arabic accent. I could easily speak Arabic with him, but it was better for now to let him assume I was an American and, therefore, statistically speaking, limited to English and two years of another language in high school.
“Are you from the Ministry of Antiquities?” I asked. These days, admitting you had old stuff from Egypt would earn you a visit from men with mirrored sunglasses.
“No, Mr. O’Sullivan,” he chuckled in surprise. “My relationship with them is rather strained. In any case, I doubt they even know of the existence of the particular work I’m looking for. Nor are they likely to care, since it has nothing to do with the pharaohs. It’s simply a book written in Coptic, either first or perhaps second century, and it contains a collection of recipes for cooking lamb. Might you have anything remotely resembling such a book?”
I did indeed. Privately I called it the Grimoire of the Lamb, because it was otherwise untitled. It had somehow been shelved incongruously amongst some darker works at Alexandria—including Bast’s catskin collection of sexercises, which I now called Nice Kitty! This was the first time anyone had ever asked about the grimoire, however. The number of people who could speak Coptic today, including myself, was probably only a few hundred. I’d kept the book as a curiosity, but this man’s inquiry raised a whole new line of questioning.
“I might,” I said, and fished for more information. “Can you give me any more clues about what this might look like?”
“I have never seen it or read any descriptions of its physical appearance. But it was thought to have been in the Library of Alexandria at one time.”
Affecting my best clueless-American tone, I said, “Didn’t that burn down?”
“Yes, but the book I seek was removed prior to that.”
“It’s pretty old, then. Papyrus o
r parchment?”
“Parchment of unusual quality.” He’d nailed it. What was his source?
“It’s probably severely degraded by now; might be unreadable. Would that be a deal-breaker for you?”
“No, not at all, sir,” he said.
I walked out from behind the tea station to the rare-book case on the north wall of my shop; the sale of something like this could ensure a profit for the year and maybe the next one as well, recession or no. Not that I couldn’t afford to take a loss. The sale of rare books and antiquities was just one of many get-rich-slow schemes I’d come up with throughout my very long life. The slow part was living until pop culture aged long enough to take on the luster of dignity and the physical product deteriorated to the point where it could whisper of a halcyon epoch before the buyer’s time.
My rare books were heavily secured for both the mundane and the magical world. I didn’t need to unlock the bindings and disable the wards just to check on the grimoire—I could look through the bulletproof glass. It was still there, sitting amongst my Egyptian goodies.
“All right, I have it. Thirteen recipes for lamb.”
“Excellent!” The excitement in his voice carried across the Atlantic very well. “How much? I can wire you the money immediately.”
“No, you’ll need to purchase it in person.”
A pause on the other end of the line. “Can you not ship internationally?”
“I can, but I won’t. This is a magical text. I don’t trust them to the mail.”