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

by Joel Rosenberg

  There's a street corner up ahead, a place where I somehow know that a right angle turn will bring us to safety, and I shout out directions.

  It seems to be working. They flicker out as they turn, and I somehow know, as you can only know in a dream, that they've escaped, not found themselves in the Place Where Trees Scream.

  But the wolf-things approach, accompanied by the shambling orcs, their fangs dripping blood.

  And then I see him: Karl Cullinane, Jason's father, standing tall, face beaming, his hands, chest, and beard streaked with blood and gore.

  "We're going to have to stall them," Karl says. "Who's with me?"

  He smiles, as though he's been waiting his whole life for this, the fucking idiot.

  "I'm with you," somebody says.

  Figures push out of the crowd, some bloodied, some bent.

  Tennetty's the first. Not the aging, wasted one, more used up than aged, but a younger, vigorous Tennetty, her sneer intact. "Count me in."

  Andy's next to her, looking foxy in her leathers, a small leather shield strapped to her left arm, a smoking pistol in her right. She smiles at me. "You don't think I need magic to count, do you?"

  Big Mike hefts his baton, tapping it lightly against his thigh. "Never need anything, eh?"

  My brother Steve fixes the bayonet to the end of his empty M16. His smile is reassuring. "Sharp edges don't jam, eh, Cricket?"

  Karl looks at me—they all look at me—his bloody face puzzled. "Walter? What are you waiting for?"

  I was about to say something, to tell them something important, but—

  * * *

  I woke in a cold sweat, in the dark.

  Just a dream. No big deal, I tried to persuade myself as I wiped the sweat off my forehead.

  It was dark; I'd slept—or nightmared, if you want to be accurate—all through the day and well into the night.

  Somebody had snuck in while I was sleeping and had not only laid out some fresh clothes, but had filled the copper washbasin, then set the lantern underneath it to keep the chill off, if not keep it warm.

  I stripped down to skin and scabbards, then splashed a little on my face and chest before pulling on the trousers and slipping the shirt over my head. A full bath could wait until I had some food, but not much longer. A nice hot soak was just what the cleric ordered.

  I swallowed. Okay. Now, what?

  There was a knock at the door.

  "Come," I said, slipping the handle of a knife into my hand. I mean, I didn't need to fight with Bren, but maybe he wouldn't know that. It does not take two to have a fight.

  Andy walked in, a lantern in one hand, a tray of food balanced on the other. "I had one of the guards listening for any sign of movement in here," she said. "I wanted to get to you before things get . . . hectic."

  I forced a smile. That was a good word for it. Hectic. I liked that. "And you wanted to talk to me," I said. I bit into a cold drumstick. "You wanted to talk to me about something else, about, say, about how now that you're no longer a wizard, you want to go into what Karl used to call the family business, and about how you need a teacher, and about how I'm not going to be completely comfortable around here for the next while, and about how maybe I ought to be the teacher, eh?"

  She nodded. No smile. Just a nod. I wondered if the only place she ever was going to smile again was in my nightmares. "Good," she said, matter-of-factly.

  "And what did you think I was going to say?"

  "Yes. I thought you'd say yes."

  "Okay: yes." I nodded. "I've got to straighten out some things, some family matters, but then we go into training, and we hit the road as soon as we can."

  She looked like she had a question.

  "Lesson the first: ask it. When you've got time, always ask."

  She thought it over for a moment. "Why are you so eager to get back on the road?"

  "You want the truth?"

  "Sure." She smiled. "Why not."

  I shrugged, and looked back to the sweat-soaked rumpled blankets heaped on the bed and floor. "So I can get a good night's sleep."

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  The heroes in Walter's dream sequences are intended to be Walter's, not mine; there'd be some overlap, but my list wouldn't include many of his selections, and vice versa.

  Each of us, after all, does get to—and has to!—pick our own.

  —J.R.

  The Road Home

  Dedication

  This one's for three of my teachers:

  Robert A. Heinlein

  Donald Hamilton

  David Drake.

  Acknowledgments

  Some Acknowledgments and

  a Mercifully Short Hail and Farewell:

  The truth is that the beginning of anything and its end are alike touching.

  —Yoshida Kenko

  —which is the quote with which the book begins, quite appropriately; but it bears repeating here.

  As I write this, it's been a dozen years since I sold The Sleeping Dragon to Sheila Gilbert, then editor of what was then the Signet SF line—the line of books that's now the Roc imprint of Penguin USA.

  I'm not sure, sometimes, if that feels like yesterday, or like a million years ago.

  A bit of both, I guess. Long enough, certainly.

  While it's time for both me and further books in and out of the series to move on (and, yes, the Guardians stories will continue), I wanted to take this last opportunity to express my gratitude to all the good people who have worked at this company—in management, in editorial, in production, and in marketing and sales—who have helped with the books over such a long, and largely rewarding, period of time.

  Thanks, folks. It's been real.

  * * *

  As usual, I'm indebted to the Usual Suspects—Bruce Bethke, Pat Wrede, Peg Kerr Ihinger—and even more than usually to my agent, Eleanor Wood; and I'm always grateful to my wife, Felicia Herman, and my daughters Judy and Rachel, for things that have both little and much to do with the work at hand.

  PROLOGUE

  The Road from Ehvenor

  The truth is that the beginning of anything and its end are alike touching.

  —Yoshida Kenko

  A hero's work is never done, which is one of the minor reasons I don't recommend the profession.

  —Walter Slovotsky

  Below, in the dark, in the city with the gleaming building at its heart, the flickering had stopped. But the killing hadn't.

  He was supposed to feel a sense of satisfaction, Jason Cullinane thought. But he didn't. Whatever good he and the rest had done, they had also loosed more violence upon the world.

  Shit. Like there wasn't enough already.

  And the cost . . . worst of all, it had cost them Tennetty. But he would not cry over Tennetty. Never. She was just his father's tame killer, that's all she had been, that's all she ever had been. She hadn't been his friend, not at all. It was just that she had latched onto him as the closest available substitute for Karl Cullinane.

  But I'm not Karl Cullinane, he thought. I'm just Jason Cullinane, I'm just eighteen years old, and I can't carry it all. He realized that he had been unconsciously tightening, then loosening the shoulder muscles beneath his leather tunic. Mainly tightening. He felt like a lute string, wound too tight, ready to break at the slightest pluck.

  He would not allow himself to break. That would not be permitted.

  He almost jumped out of his skin when the dwarf patted him on the shoulder.

  "It'll be okay," Ahira said. His face, broader than any human's could possibly be, was split in a grin that spoke more of relief than reassurance, although only his expression and the way sweat had slicked his hair down betrayed the exhaustion that the dwarf must have felt.

  But he looked strange. Jason still hadn't gotten used to looking down at Ahira. Ahira had shrunk over the years in Jason's mind, if not in reality. Jason had known the dwarf for all of his life, and remembered looking up to him and wondering why all the grownups made short jokes
about him, jokes that Ahira took not just with good grace, but with good humor, most of the time with a broad smile on his lips, all the time—at least in Jason's memory—with at least a trace of a grin.

  In Jason's mind, the dwarf would still always tower over him, the way Ahira had when Jason was a baby, the way Ahira had loomed above him when Jason had taken his first steps toward those thick, hairy arms, toward the utter safety of those broad, strong hands. His father was gone too much of the time; Ahira had always been there. That smile had always been there.

  "It'll all be okay. Trust me," the dwarf said, with just that trace of a smile.

  Jason's mouth twisted. "I'll try."

  Jason and Ahira had done their part, and the rent in reality had been sealed, and whether it was by Jason's mother or by the Three didn't really matter. It was done.

  There was only a mess to be cleaned up, or lived with.

  Below, the narrow streets of Ehvenor were filled with bands of the beasts Walter Slovotsky insisted on calling orcs, some fighting with each other, some fleeing into the countryside. Some sought the shelter of the hill, but it would be next to impossible to climb its rocky sides, and the plains and forest beyond the city were much more inviting than a narrow, twisting path up the side of a hill. They should be safe for now.

  "Shit," Walter Slovotsky said. "Like closing the city dump and turning all the rats loose."

  Not just orcs, either. Some immense creature, its broad side a glossy black in the starlight, slipped into the dark waters of the Cirric to disappear, only a momentary wake marking its passage. Another huge thing, misshapen and dark, flapped leathery wings as it vanished behind the city.

  Jason turned his back on Ehvenor.

  There were seven gathered around the hissing, spitting campfire. An elf, two dwarves, and four humans, if you included the Hand woman, who had no name and little of her own identity.

  Mother, huddled in her blanket next to the campfire, was still weeping. Jason sat down next to her, put his arm around her, and pulled her close to him. What could he say? She had done it. She had brought Nareen's Eye close enough that the woman of the Hand could see and Vair the Uncertain could sear the rent shut.

  It had been done, but Mother had spent not just her magic but her ability to do magic, burned it away to accomplish her goal.

  Jason felt at the amulet around his neck. Nareen said that it would still work, that the sort of magic Mother had used to make it was mechanical, not transubstantive, but all Jason cared about was that it still worked, that it still protected him from being magically located as long as he wore it.

  Jason looked over to where the Three stood. Nareen, the dwarf glassmaker wizard, rubbing a thumb idly against the side of his face: more aged and shriveled than any other dwarf Jason had ever met.

  Vair the Uncertain, the elf: tall, rangy, and distant; under short, sharp bangs his eyes focused on something far away.

  A nameless woman of the Healing Hand: watching the city with one eye of flesh and one Eye of glass.

  Still Mother cried. Her shoulders shook with tears as she leaned close to Jason, seeking what comfort she could from his arm and shoulder.

  Walter Slovotsky's all-is-wonderful-with-a-world-clever-enough-to-contain-Walter-Slovotsky smile was intact, and never mind that it seemed forced. They could all live with forced. His hands shaking only marginally, he reached into his pack and brought out a battered metal flask, then pulled the cork and drank deeply before passing the bottle to Ahira.

  "Well," Ahira said, considering, "I think we earned that." He took a drink, then held the flask out toward the Hand woman.

  She declined the offer with an upraised palm, her eyes, both real and glass, never leaving the pageant below. "Magical beasts loosed into the wild, into the earth and air and water," she said. She cocked her head to one side, and Jason wasn't sure, but perhaps there was a slim smile on her lips. Or perhaps not. "Things haven't been like this since I was a little girl."

  She lifted a small bag to her shoulder, turned, and walked out into the night. It was all done so smoothly and casually that it was a long moment before Jason realized that she had left them.

  Something bumped against Jason's arm. He looked up to see Ahira holding out the flask. Whiskey was not what Jason needed, and neither did the weeping woman leaning against his shoulder; he took the flask and passed it along to Nareen, who took a polite sip.

  Vair produced a wire frame holding a clear red stone, and held it in the long fingers of his right hand, while with his left he threw a pinch of powder on the fire, then eyed the resulting smoke through his lens.

  "It could be worse, perhaps," the elf said, his voice high-pitched but quiet, like the call of a distant hunting horn. "All of Faerie could have poured through, possibly. If the breach had not been sealed, if the one who cut the breach had not been stopped." He turned for a moment to Walter Slovotsky, and it looked like he was going to say something, but then the elf just tucked the ruby in his belt pouch, and left, vanishing in the darkness.

  Really vanishing.

  Jason turned to Ahira. Had anybody actually touched Vair? Had he really been here? He was going to ask, but there wasn't any point, and it didn't matter, not with his mother sobbing on his shoulder.

  Why didn't somebody do something?

  Nareen chuckled gently, for that is the way the Moderate People chuckle. "There is nothing to be done, young Cullinane. There is only much to be endured."

  Nareen walked to the two of them and gently, slowly, pried Mother away from Jason, his fingers gentle against both Jason's arm and her shoulder, and took her small, delicate hands in his huge ones.

  "You see," he said to Jason, although Jason couldn't figure out why Nareen would be talking to him, "those of us with the gift know a truth, that there is no pleasure quite like using it, like refining it." The dwarfs hands stroked hers in a way Jason tried to find offensive, perhaps almost obscene, but couldn't. "Most of us know that we must be careful in its use," Nareen went on relentlessly, "that if we use too much of the gift, push it too far, we will have to choose between it and sanity, and who would choose sanity compared to the glory of the power rippling up and down your spine, eh?"

  Mother tried to pull her hands away from his, but the dwarf held her tighter. Jason was going to say something, to interfere, but Ahira's broad hand was on his shoulder, and Ahira's face was grim.

  "No," Nareen said. "You made your decision. To feed your power not with your sanity, but with your ability." A broad dwarven finger traced a red glow in front of her face. "Your ability to see this as sharp lines instead of a red blur, and all that implies. My compliments," he said. He eased her to the ground, and started to turn away.

  But no—"Don't leave yet." Jason held up a hand. Mikyn was still running around loose, and he had to be found. "Wait. I—we, that is. We helped you. I'd like some help, from you." He swallowed. "There's a friend of mine, doing some horrible things. I need to find him. Help me." There were things he knew about Mikyn that nobody else did, that the abuse he had suffered as a boy was not just at his father's hands, but at the hands of an owner with perverted tastes. It had become, apparently, too much for him.

  Ahira's gaze was frankly appraising. Was Jason insisting on this right now because of an obligation to Mikyn, or because he couldn't stand his mother's tears? He didn't have to voice the question; it might as well have been written across his forehead in big, blocky letters.

  It was too bad that the answer wasn't.

  I'll tell you someday, Ahira, when I know. If I ever know. That was the trouble: if he couldn't tell when he was behaving nobly or selfishly, how could he expect others to get it right?

  Nareen nodded. "Perhaps just a little."

  "Okay."

  Ahira was smiling at Walter Slovotsky, in that way that old friends smiled at each other in assurance and with reassurance. "What am I going to say?" he said.

  Slovotsky returned the smile.

  Jason felt more like an outsider than
usual.

  "Ask, Jason," Slovotsky said. "It'll be good practice."

  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