They were always trying to train him, and most of the time he didn't mind. This wasn't most of the time, but there was no point in arguing now. "That somebody has to take Mother home," he said, "but that I'm still too young and stupid—"
"Inexperienced," the dwarf said, interrupting.
"But close enough," Walter added.
It was what they meant anyway.
"—to be running around on my own." He swallowed, hard. "So," he went on, a catch in his voice, "one of you had better come with me. The one that's better at keeping out of trouble, not the one that's better at getting into it." Much better to be traveling with Ahira and not Slovotsky. There was going to be more than enough trouble between here and wherever Mikyn was.
"I wonder—who could that be?" Ahira's grin was almost infectious. Almost.
He turned to Slovotsky. "You'll watch out for Mother?"
"Sure," Slovotsky said. "Andrea needs some rest. The two of us, at least, had better camp here for tonight, head up into the hills tomorrow."
Jason tied his rucksack shut while Nareen made some arrangements with Walter Slovotsky.
Ahira nodded. "'Twere best done quickly, eh?"
"There is that."
Slovotsky hugged him, and for the first time Jason realized how much he would miss the big man. There was something about him that was oddly reassuring. Maybe it was his easygoing self-confidence that would have bordered on egotism if only it could have been toned down. Or maybe not.
Slovotsky turned to Ahira, his grin still intact. "Watch your six, short one," he said. "And if you need me . . ."
Nareen and Ahira leading the way, they walked off into what was left of the night.
Behind them, Ehvenor stood in the dawn light, empty, no sign of life save for the gleaming building in its center.
1
In Which I Have a Bad Dream and an
Unpleasant Chat with an Old Friend
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.
—William Shakespeare
Will, your sister has an 800 number.
—Walter Slovotsky
The nightmare is always the same:
We're trying to make our escape from Hell, millions of us streaming down the concrete corridors, past the open cells, toward the front gate, and safety. Bodies are packed tightly, too tightly, and it's all I can do to stay on my feet without knocking anybody else down.
Everybody I've ever loved is there, along with strange faces, some of which I know should be familiar. I can pick out the beefy face of Mrs. Thompson, my second-grade teacher, and I hold out a hand toward her, hoping to pull her close, but she's swept away from me into the crowd.
Behind us, there's a screaming pack of demons. Some of them are cartoons right out of Fantasia, and some are huge misshapen wolves like Boioardo. Others are just . . . different. There's one that looks like a human, except that he's got the head of a goat and an erect penis the size of my arm, and there's another that seems to be covered in boiling oatmeal, but they're all chasing us, and they're all getting closer.
One exit is up ahead: a steel door to the courtyard outside, dangling on its hinges.
The crowd pushes through.
I can't tell who's gone through, but I can only hope . . . Please. Let it be my daughters, my friends, the people I love. Please, God.
It occurs to me that I could be making sure that they're safe, I could be going with them, and who the hell told me my place was here?
There's a hand on my shoulder. "I did, asshole. Although I'm not the only one."
I'm not at all surprised to see Karl Cullinane standing there, surrounded by the rest of the legion of the dead. What surprises me is that his hair is gray as a winter storm cloud, and that his face is lined with wrinkles. He's at least sixty.
But . . . he can't be. He wasn't much older than forty when he died, buying the rest of us time to escape.
Tennetty, her sneer as intact as her eyepatch, smiles at me out of a face that's withered and lined and just plain used up. "Who else would have, eh?"
Beyond her stands a company of old men, all dressed in white sailor's tunics. Some brandish swords, some spears, another a net and trident.
"Some work of noble note, eh?" The one who seems to be their leader takes a step forward. He's impossibly old; his face is deeply creased like ancient leather, and his hair and beard are white and fine as spun silk. But his back is straight and his high voice is clear as a glass of cold white wine. "Even fifty years ago, I could have held them by myself," he says. "But today, I will have your help, whoever you are."
Us help him?
I would tell him to go to hell, but, hey, what the fuck? We're already there.
Karl just clasps him on the shoulder. His voice cracks around the edges, not with fear, but with age. "We will hold the corridor," Karl says. "Who else is with me?"
Then I wake up.
* * *
Back when I was a kid, sure as anything, the moment my temperature hit 103 degrees, the nightmares would come. Fever dreams, Stash and Emma used to call them.
Not the usual kind of nightmares, either—familiar, reassuring things would turn dark and threatening, and somehow their familiarity was proof of the threat. The clock on the wall opposite my bed would stare down with a horrible, baleful glare, while I knew that just behind the open door to my closet misshapen things waited with evil intent, evidenced by the menacing way the shirts hung on their hangers, proven by the way a pair of pants lying on the floor huddled in a limp mass. I'd drift off to a light sleep without knowing it, and things would melt around me, while I'd huddle under the blankets, impossibly cold and wet with sweat, afraid to poke my head out.
A regular nightmare would go away by itself when I woke up, but not these fever dreams, not until the fever went below that critical temperature. And while just the touch of Mom's smooth, warm fingers to my forehead could dispel an ordinary nightmare, not even Slash's thick, callused hands could chase away the fever dreams.
It wasn't just that they were scary—everybody has nightmares, every now and then, but when you wake up, they're gone. What was horrible about it was that every time I'd close my eyes to sleep, the fever dreams would be there waiting for me, like some monster hiding in the dark behind a door.
* * *
I couldn't sleep; the bed was too comfortable, but the nightmares weren't. They were always the same, and I was always the same when I woke up, too sweaty to sleep, too scared to try, too tired to do anything useful.
At my movement, Aeia cuddled closer, her head pillowed on my shoulder, hair spilling like warm silk all over my neck and arm, her breath warm on my chest. The light of the candle sputtering in its pewter holder on the table next to our bed turned her face all lovely and golden. Not that it needed any help. High cheekbones, vaguely slanted eyes, rich, full lips making up the stubborn mouth that goes with being a Cullinane by birth or adoption . . . I would have pulled her closer, but I was bathed in enough sweat to mat down my chest hair, and I didn't think that cold and clammy was all that romantic.
What I really needed was to be held. I guess you never outgrow that.
Damn, damn, damn.
Back on the Other Side, I was an unusually big man, with all that implies. Not particularly clumsy, mind, but I was not overly graceful. I lost some size and bulk in the transition, and gained enough dexterity and deftness to be able to slip out of bed without waking her. Not that I had a choice, but even if I had one, I'd make the trade in half a second.
There's a lot I would have missed otherwise.
Too much.
I looked down at her for a moment.
Truth to think, if not to tell, I would have broken things off with Aeia and gone back to my wife. Or at least that was what I'd told myself. And even that was saying too much. I would have given
up, or tried to give up, Aeia in my bed; I wouldn't have given her up as a friend. A lover, I can dispense with; somebody I love, no. I don't do that.
Shit, not even after they're dead.
Tennetty, Karl, Chak, all of you . . . I miss you every minute.
I slipped into a blousy pair of trousers, and noticed that I didn't have as much slack drawstring as I was used to. Hmm, my waist was starting to slip, just a little. Fifty more daily sit-ups perhaps, or maybe I could figure out some other exercise that would give me a flat stomach for another couple of years.
Getting old, Walter, I told myself, all too truthfully. It was hard to figure exactly, but I was more than forty years old, and definitely slowing down. Forty didn't seem so old, but shit, when I was a kid, I didn't think God was older than thirty. Maybe it wasn't quite yet time to give up this running around and getting in trouble, but the time was soon approaching. I'd been just a trace too slow in Fenevar, and that had endangered the others. If it wasn't for Ahira, if it wasn't for Tennetty, if it wasn't for Andy with a spell on the tip of her tongue, we would all have died horribly there.
Once more. One more time, maybe. Enough to give Andy a chance to get out and get a taste of it, then the worn-out ones of us could settle down and turn things over to the younger crowd, and those of their elders who still had it.
One more time, once to purge the nightmares, and then I'd be done.
Jason was coming along, and hell, Thomen was the Emperor. Over in Home, Petros was running things mostly just fine, and Lou would still be active for the foreseeable future—the mid-forties didn't make an engineer old—and who could tell about Ahira? Dwarves didn't age much after they reached maturity. A hundred and fifty, perhaps two hundred years, then a quick decline to a dramatic senility, and then gone. How old was he? Well, back on the Other Side, Ahira Bandylegs had been thought of as not quite middle-aged. For a dwarf, less than a hundred. Perhaps he had another century in front of him, where I'd be lucky to have another forty, fifty years.
Well, to hell with it. We all live under a death sentence—and most of us under the Prisoner's Dilemma. If worrying over it would do any good, all humanity would be immortal, instead of most of it being immoral.
Another English joke. The words for "immortal" and "immoral" in Erendra didn't sound similar. Devorent was a form of "to live," with the indefinite prefix; enkeden was a simple negation of keden. None of the locals would get it; they all tended to think in Erendra and not in English. Even Janie and the rest of the kids.
I don't know why that made me as sad as it did.
Never mind that. Once more, one more time to dispel the nightmares, and then I'd settle down. See if I could work some minor miracles with Imperial agriculture, or just ask Thomen for a ranch of my own. Surely the Empire owed me at least that much, I thought. Surely the Emperor owed me at least that much, I thought. Surely I owed myself that much, I thought.
Surely too much thinking was making me hungry, and thirsty. Even if U'len wasn't up yet, there would be something to eat in the pantry—maybe some slices off last night's joint of mutton, washed down with a glass of milk from the coldcellar.
Or a quick snort of Riccetti's Best. No. Best not to drink that if I was going to try to get more sleep. The nightmares were already bad enough.
I slipped a pair of throwing knives nevermindexactlywhere, then opened the door no more than was necessary in order to slip out, preventing the hall lantern from shining down on Aeia's face. That might have woken her up, and she would have wanted to talk, and while I don't sleep with anybody I won't talk with, what I wanted now was some privacy and something cold to drink.
The hall carpet was soft beneath my bare feet.
Down the hall stood what had been my room, now officially occupied only by my wife, Kirah. Unofficially, that scumbag Bren Adahan was probably creeping down the hidden passageway from his connecting room to sleep with her, although perhaps that was just a passing phase. It wasn't being touched that made Kirah crazy, that triggered memories of things she wanted to forget.
It was being touched by me, but it wasn't my damn fault.
Or maybe it was; I guess it depends on how you look at it.
It would have been so easy to lose my temper, and I could have gotten away with that. Find your wife in bed with another man, be it in Holtun-Bieme or pretty damn near anywhere else, and few will blame you for killing them both in a white heat of anger.
It would be so easy.
But who was I kidding? There are problems that can be solved by kicking open a door and chopping everybody inside into tiny little bits, but no matter how I looked at it, no matter how shitty Kirah had made me feel, this wasn't one of those. We had been together for close to twenty years, had had two daughters, and in all that time, I'd never raised my hand to Kirah. Breaking a string like that by stabbing her and her lover in their bed wasn't really on the agenda.
Neither was slapping his face repeatedly, forehand and backhand, until I'd loosened every single tooth and he looked like he had a mouthful of bloody Chiclets.
Although it did make me feel good to think about it.
Sublimate, sublimate, dance to the music . . .
I headed downstairs, and at the bottom of the stairs, started toward the kitchen and pantry, only to freeze at the sound of a voice behind me:
"Late night, again?" Doria Perlstein, her legs curled up underneath her, was sitting on an oversized, overstuffed chair at the end of the downstairs hallway, which sounds like a stranger place to hang out than it is. That end of the hallway had long—back a couple of Furnaels or twelve—been a sitting area, where the lady of the house could sit and knit or chat and take tea, all the while keeping an eye on the staff bustling in and out of the kitchen, without them being right in her lap. Doria had a stack of papers on an ancient lapdesk. All governments, even that of Barony Cullinane, live on paper, I guess, and I didn't have reason to doubt that the regent would have it any different.
"Well," I said, shrugging, "yeah."
"Not surprised. Seems to run in the family."
"Oh?"
"Your youngest wandered down a while ago. I sent her to the kitchen."
"My baby daughter's sleeping in the kitchen," I said, trying for a deadpan delivery to let the words speak for themselves.
Doria smiled. "U'len's watching over her. She rigged a nice little spot between the oven and the woodbin, protected by a bit of latticework—when the oven's low, it keeps things toasty warm. I wouldn't worry."
It's not your daughter, I didn't say, and not because Doria couldn't have children. She would no more have let Doranne sleep in unsafe proximity to a stove than I would, so I just let it drop.
Doria was dressed in a thin black robe, belted tightly around her waist, that made her normally pale skin seem wan, except that the smoothness of her complexion and the hints of highlights at the cheekbones turned it all smooth and creamy. She adjusted the cleavage at the opening of her robe for a moment, then smiled up at me.
"Not fair to tease the animals, Doria," I said, although that was just for effect. Doria and I had long since worked out that being friends worked better for us than being lovers, and what with things being new for Aeia and me, I wasn't exactly suffering.
"Pity." She tossed her head, once, flirtingly, clearing the fringe of blond hair from her eyes. Most women look better to me with long hair, but there was something about the way her short hair flipped from side to side that was particularly pretty, and kind of young, a strange contrast to her wide eyes with their golden irises, eyes that seemed to be ancient.
"You know the difference between your friends and your partners?" she asked, a slight smile on her full lips.
"Which kind of partner?"
"Ahira, Karl, Chak, Tennetty—that kind."
"Yeah: some of my friends are lovely; those kinds of partners aren't."
She shook her head. "It's the eyes. You and Ahira almost never look each other in the eye. I used to think it was that you were afrai
d to, but I was wrong. You're each always standing watch, and you know in your heart and your gut that you don't have to watch each other, so you unconsciously divide the universe into the part that you watch over and the part that your partner watches over, like the rest of the universe is the enemy."
"Sometimes . . ." I started to say something, but I didn't quite know what. "Sometimes the rest of the universe is the enemy, kiddo." Slovotsky's Law Number Sixteen: When the universe doesn't give a fuck, don't be mad: it's being as friendly as it ever gets.
"Sometimes it's just the job that is the enemy." She tapped a fingernail on the paper spread out on her lapdesk. "Running a barony is a fair amount of work."
"Think Jason might keep you on after he gets back?" I asked.
"Could be." She shrugged. "I've had better jobs, although not recently," she said. A smirk quirked across her lips for just a second until it could become a smile. She carefully stacked the papers, then set the lapdesk down on the table at her elbow. "Not that I've gotten a lot done tonight. I haven't been able to concentrate tonight, anyway. I was wondering when you'd show up," she said.
"I'm that predictable, eh?"
Everybody I love has at least one habit that drives me absolutely bugfuck, even though I try not to show it. With Ahira, it's his stubborn unwillingness to admit the obvious and insist that I do. With Janie, it's that she's always a step ahead of me. With Doria, it's her habit of changing the subject from light to serious.
"No," she said, sobering irritatingly. "But I've been talking to Aeia. More to the point, she came to me. Says you've been having trouble sleeping."
I shrugged. "Happens, off the road." Each of us grows our own night demons; mine bother me when I'm in a soft bed at home, even if the home wasn't technically mine, but the property of the Cullinane barons. My subconscious only deals in technicalities when it's holding them against me.
She shook her head. "That isn't going to fly." She licked her lips, once, and then pursed them for a moment. "You're eating like a horse, and I'm given to understand you're getting regular exercise," she said, quirking a smile, "both in and out of bed."
Guardians of The Flame: To Home And Ehvenor (The Guardians of the Flame #06-07) Page 32
