Guardians of The Flame: To Home And Ehvenor (Guardians of the Flame #06-07)

by Joel Rosenberg

  "No," Ahira said. "If there's something really sticky going on there, we don't want to drop right in on it. Better to work our way up to it, and sniff around as we go. The locals may have done some of the looking into things for us."

  Better, yes. Best was to keep the hell out of it. I didn't say as much, but I guess my face showed it.

  Ahira turned to Jason. "Give us a minute, will you?"

  "But—"

  "Now will be fine," he said, gesturing to the door of the smithy. "You can get my saddle from the stable. I want to put a few more equipment rings on it."

  He stood in the doorway, watching the boy walk away, then turned back to me.

  "Give it up, Walter," Ahira said. "You don't have to go, nobody's going to hold an axe to your throat. But you know you're going, just as well as I do." His chuckle was hollow in his barrel chest. "Three reasons; take your pick. First," he said, "because while this whole thing about creatures coming out of Faerie was distant, as of about ten days ago it became local, it became personal. Your wife and kids live in this country, in this barony, and you're no more going to leave that kind of menace uninvestigated than I am."

  He looked up at me. "Second reason: Jason, Andy, Tennetty, and I are going. You're not going to let us go into this alone," he said, as though daring me to dispute it.

  "Noble guy, aren't I?" I smiled.

  He didn't take the bait, not directly. "One last reason," he said, not looking me in the eye. "Your wife won't let you touch her, and if you can get away for awhile, you won't have to deal with that. You can put off handling that for as long as we're on the road." He turned back to the forge.

  I wanted to be angry, to be furious with him for mentioning it. If he'd said it in the presence of anybody else, I know I would have been.

  But he was right. On all three counts.

  Damn, damn, damn.

  Jason walked through the doorway, a saddle slung over his shoulder. "Where do you want this?" he asked.

  "Just dump it on the floor," Ahira said. "You'd best go pack. We leave in the morning."

  * * *

  As we walked away, Jason's brow furrowed. "What was that all about?"

  "What?"

  He gestured clumsily. "Ahira. It was like he was . . . I don't know. Not there. Angry, maybe. Was it something I said?"

  "Nah. It's not you. Game face," I said.

  "Eh?"

  "Never mind."

  He frowned.

  I thought about explaining that even when you look at the football game as a job, as a way to pay for school, you get yourself psyched up for it, and that when you trot out on the field, your heart pumping hard, the ground springy beneath your feet, ready to, say, grab a quarterback and slam him down so hard that his descendants will still ache, there's a kind of glare you wear, whether or not you intend to. And then I thought about how he probably didn't have the background to appreciate it, and how I didn't feel like explaining football to a This Sider.

  And then I thought about how if I kept saying "Never mind" to the kid every time he asked a question, he was going to slip a knife into me someday, so I just smiled.

  "Honest," I said. "It's not important."

  * * *

  I'd said goodbye to the kids, and to the pups, so I went over the list one more time. Weapons, clothes, food, money, miscellaneous. Miscellaneous was, as always, the largest category. I was packed for running, if necessary—the most important stuff was in either my belt pouch or my small rucksack.

  Grab and run, if I had to. When the shit comes down, you grab your friends, and—if time—your essentials. Leave the rest be.

  There was a gout of fire below in the courtyard.

  *They're waiting for you. So am I.*

  So wait a bit longer.

  My big rucksack was packed solid; I took it to the window and tossed it down to Ahira's waiting hands. Thunk,

  I turned back to Kirah. "Like the old days, eh, old girl?" I asked, smiling.

  She didn't smile back. "I don't want you to go."

  Walter Slovotsky's advice to wives whose husbands are packing for a trip: be nice. Let problems lie.

  Look—trivial problems can wait, or you can solve them yourself while your spouse is gone. That's why we call them trivial, eh? They're not important. You can't solve anything serious between the time he takes his rucksack down out of the closet and when he heads out the door. That's not the time to try.

  All it can do is screw up his mind while he's gone. So leave it be. This wasn't a time to be discussing that; it wasn't the time for either of us to be discussing anything.

  The obvious thing, the right thing for me to do was to ignore what she'd just said.

  "Right," I said. "And you don't want me to stay, either. You can't stand to have me touch you, remember?"

  "Please. Don't blame me for that." She faced me in the doorway. "It's not my fault, Walter. I try, but every time you touch me, it's like . . ." she raised her hand in apology, as a shudder shook her frame. "I'm sorry."

  Walter Slovotsky's advice to husbands leaving on a trip is ever the same . . .

  I gripped her arms tightly, ignoring her struggles. "It's not my fault, either, Kirah. I didn't do that to you, and I won't be blamed for it. I won't—" I started, then stopped, and let her go. She gripped herself across the middle and turned away. Her shoulders shook as she fell to her knees.

  "No." I won't live my life in penance for harm others have done to you, I didn't quite say.

  *It's neither of your fault, if you want my opinion,* Ellegon said, his voice pitched only for me.

  Thanks. I think I needed that.

  *All part of the service. Should we get going, or do you want to have a few more tender moments with your wife?*

  I kissed the tips of my fingers and held them out toward her back. "Goodbye, Kirah."

  Ah, parting is such sweet sorrow . . .

  * * *

  The sun had shattered the chill of the earliest morning, but clouds were moving in, and the sky to the east was slate gray and threatening. Time to get going—flying through rain is no fun at all.

  Jason and Andrea had already climbed up and fastened themselves into their seats on the rigging we'd lashed to Ellegon's broad back, while Ahira was under the dragon's belly, giving the knots a last check. I'm as safety-conscious as anybody else, but riding Ellegon isn't like riding a horse—he'll let you know if things start to give.

  *Alternately, if I do have it in for you, a few strands of rope aren't going to make a difference.* The dragon snorted, startling the honor guard of soldiers who had gathered to bid us good journeying.

  Doria was taking her duties as Steward seriously—she had a list of things to do sticking out of her blouse pocket.

  "Going to have this place in good shape by the time we're back, eh?" I asked, with a knowing smirk.

  She smiled and shrugged. "I lost my old profession when I defied the Mother; I'd better find something else I can do." She knew better. If nothing else, there was always a job open at the Home school, teaching English, civics, and pretty much anything else; besides, Lou Riccetti would be glad to have her around.

  "Home ec majors," I sniffed. I gave Doria a quick squeeze goodbye, then climbed up and belted myself into the saddle behind Tennetty.

  She turned in her seat and gave me a quick glare. "You took long enough."

  "Leave it be." Andrea frowned her into silence.

  "Everything okay?" Ahira asked, as he levered himself into his seat and belted himself in, too firmly; dwarves dislike flying almost as much as they do traveling by boat.

  Jason felt at the butt of his revolver, from where it projected under his jacket. "All set."

  Tennetty folded her arms in front of her chest and leaned back against the pile of gear lashed between the two of us. "Fine."

  Andrea gestured in impatience. "Let's go."

  "Ducky," I said. "Let's get the fuck out of here."

  *Hang on . . .*

  PART TWO

 
ROADWORK

  CHAPTER TEN

  In Which We Reach Fenevar,

  and the Trail Heats Up

  'Tis the men, not the houses, that make the city.

  —THOMAS FULLER

  Health hint for the traveler: Don't throw rocks at guys with guns.

  —WALTER SLOVOTSKY

  I've always taken the ideas from where I could get them. Hey—I'm not as inventive as Lou; I do the best I can.

  I got the "Warrior lives" notes from my big brother, Steve. It was one of the few Vietnam stories he ever told me. (When he wasn't drinking, that is. Two beers and he'd start with the stories, and wouldn't stop with either the stories or the drinking until he was totally wasted.)

  It wasn't something he'd done—he had spent most of his time in Vietnam as a door gunner on a sort-of-unarmed helicopter, what they called a slick—but it was a habit that some of the ground soldiers had: they would leave the ace of spades, the death card, on dead enemies. The way he explained it, it supposedly started when somebody had a short deck of cards on him, and thought it kind of funny. Eventually, a lot of the outfits had their own cards printed up, with the name of their unit on them.

  "Now, let me understand this," I had said. "They'd expect Charley—"

  "You weren't there," he had said, softly. "Call them the Vietcong, or the NVA, or the enemy."

  "—they'd expect the enemy to run across dead bodies of their own people, and get spooked because they had a playing card on their heads?"

  He'd shrugged. "I didn't say it made sense. I said that's what they did. But it did make sense. It made the whole thing more personal. There was a way to make it even more personal," he had said. "But we didn't do that most of the time."

  "I thought you flew all the time," I said. If he was going to reproach me . . .

  "Just flew most of the time," he had said. And then he wouldn't say any more.

  * * *

  The ideal place to have Ellegon take us would have been as far away from Ehvenor as we could get, if you asked me; the right thing to do would then be to make tracks in the opposite direction from Ehvenor.

  That, however, wasn't the plan. The plan was to be dropped off down the coast from Ehvenor; Fenevar seemed about right. It would have been convenient to be dropped off behind some outcropping near the rocky shore of Fenevar. The only trouble was, there wasn't a rocky shore.

  The land near Fenevar was flat and at water level, more swampy than lakeshore. There wasn't much forest or other cover; as was true of much of the arable land around the Cirric, farmers had long cleared and planted well up to the edge of the freshwater sea, and beyond, growing tame wild rice in the shallow, swampy water.

  The dragon had to leave us back up the road, in the rolling foothills, a good half-day's walk down to the city.

  As we had learned back in the old raiding days, the danger when Ellegon touches down is directly related to two things: how isolated the area appears, and how long he is on the ground. We did the best that we could with both.

  How's it look? I asked, as Ellegon banked hard in a tight circle.

  The wind beat hard against my face, pulling tears from my eyes. I could barely make out the hill below in the gray predawn light, but Ellegon's eyes were better than mine; he had spotted the road that bisected it neatly, cutting through the dense wood.

  *Nobody around, as far as I can tell. Coming in.*

  Air rushed by as the dim ground rushed up. Ellegon, his wings pounding the air hard, slammed down on the dirt road.

  Their safety straps already off, Jason and Ahira slid to the ground below, while Tennetty and I pulled straps loose and tossed packs and rucksacks down. I lowered Andy down to Ahira's waiting arms, then slid down a loose strap to the ground.

  Ellegon took a few steps down the road, then leaped into the air, climbing in a tight spiral before flapping off into the sky.

  *I'll start checking rendezvous points in a couple tendays. Until we meet again, be well,* he said.

  White light flared as Ahira pulled a glowsteel from his pouch. He already had his huge rucksack on his back. "Let's go, folks. We've got a full day's march to Fenevar."

  Tennetty, shrugging into her own rucksack, nodded. "And nothing more than sour beer to look forward to at the end of the trip."

  While a modified direct approach—distract, grab, and go—is one way of getting something specific, it's a lousy way to try to find any information.

  There's any number of strategies to use when you're snooping around for intelligence—and I can always use some more intelligence.

  One of the best is also one of the simplest. Any town along a trade route—and, for obvious reasons, we've always tended to work around trade routes—has at least one travelers' inn. If it's a sizable town, usually more. Travelers—no matter what they trade in—almost always like to talk. Not always honestly, mind. Then again, who am I to complain about a bit of dishonesty?

  * * *

  All we got out of the first two inns we tried was a mild buzz.

  The talk in the Cerulean Creek Inn, the third inn of the evening, flowed like the sour beer; it tended to slop over on the floor and turn it into mud.

  The general practice along that part of the coast is to sell ale by what they call a pitcher, although it's barely half the size of a common water pitcher. Some drink right out of the pitcher; others use a mug. I poured Tennetty another mug full, then tilted mine back, barely wetting my mouth.

  She took a long pull. "Well?" she asked.

  "Well, what?"

  "What brilliant things have you found?"

  I had debated bringing Tennetty along this evening. There were plenty of problems: women warriors were rare in the Eren regions, and she was relatively well known. She was moderately famous as Karl Cullinane's one-eyed bodyguard, her temper was never fully under her control, and she scared me.

  On the other hand: her glass eye was in place, visible and entirely convincing under a fringe of hair, and nobody would have mistaken me for Karl, either in truth or in legend.

  She was the obvious choice for this, despite the minuses—she could be counted on to keep her mouth shut, unlike Jason; she wouldn't look out of place in the drinking room of an inn, unlike Andrea; she wouldn't draw the wrong sort of attention, unlike Ahira.

  Maybe I would have been better bringing Ahira along. He wouldn't have stood out: over in the far corner, a dwarf and his human companion sat, sharing a loaf of almost black bread and a bowl of thick stew of unlikely ancestry. By the cut of his leather tunic, I decided the dwarf was from Benerell—the Benerell style has always been for clothes that barely fit. The human could have been of any origin, although you'll find more of that wheaty blond color in Osgrad than elsewhere.

  Changes happen, even while you don't look for them. Or maybe particularly when you don't look for them.

  I hadn't answered Tennetty. I turned to her, raising my voice ever-so-slightly.

  "I don't know, either," I said. "That . . ."—the line called for a long pause—"thing we saw this morning was one of the strangest things that has ever reached Tybel's eyes, and that's a fact."

  The broad-faced fellow down the bench from me pricked up his ears.

  I picked up our empty pitcher and turned it over, empty. I'd buy more in a moment, unless somebody took the hint.

  "Yeah," Tennetty said, not helping much.

  I don't know about her, sometimes. This was the third time we'd tried this routine, and her side of it was no more polished than the first.

  I'm afraid I glared at her.

  "That it was," she added, chastened, trying a bit more. "Really, strange."

  It was all I could do not to raise my eyes toward the ceiling and implore the help of the gods, or of heaven.

  "Very strange."

  "Begging your pardon, traveler," the fellow whose attention I had caught said, "but did you talk of seeing something strange?" He half-rose, courteously gesturing with his own, full pitcher.

  Several times, I thought
. And pretty darned clumsily.

  "I guess I might have," I said, beckoning him over. I guess if a fish is hungry enough, he'll bite a hook with a plastic bug on it.

  He splashed some ale into each of our mugs, then politely sipped at his pitcher.

  "Lots of strange things been seen of late," he said. "More and more over the past few years. Travelers report many things, although tales do grow in the telling."

  I nodded. "That they do. But this was something that didn't grow. It was a wolf that wasn't a wolf."

  We were gathering an audience, or at least some company; the drinking room of a tavern isn't the place for those who prefer solitude. The dwarf and human pair wandered over as I launched into a seriously edited version of our encounter with Boioardo and the wolf pack: I cut out the fight, had him eating a deer instead of a cow, and placed it outside of Alfani rather than back in Bieme. I've always been a stickler for details, just never for accurate ones.

  The obvious way to find out something is to go around and ask questions, but that invariably raises the question of who you are and what you're after. Given that there is a price on my head—the Pandathaway Slavers Guild is no more fond of me than I am of them—I'd rather not answer honestly, most places I go.

  So the obvious way was out. Another way is to talk about something interesting, something related to what you're interested in, and let everybody else impress you with what they know about it.

  A little bald man, a trader in gems and gold who had given his name as Enric (and who must have been a lot tougher than he looked, given his admitted profession and lack of a bodyguard) ordered a round for the table. "It's coming from one of the Places of the other ones, perhaps, they say. Or from," he made a sign with his thumb, "there."

  "Places of the other ones?" I tried to look puzzled. "There? You mean—"

  "I mean just as I say, traveler. It's an old belief that it is dangerous to mention either by name. My grandfather, long dead though he is, used to talk of them as only them, and while I thought that strange, he did live to sixty years."

  Another man spat. "Faw. Just a superstition."