Wicked Bronze Ambition

  She was a kid, though, despite some grown-up memories. Her mind didn’t run in those gutters.

  She said, “Everybody shut their eyes.”

  Naturally, I didn’t, so when my feet left the garden paving I watched the Algarda hovel sink away behind Moonblight. And saw Moonblight go deathly pale as she watched something behind me drop out of sight.

  She was smart enough to shut her eyes; then she might have prayed. Her lips moved the whole time we were airborne.

  It wasn’t a long journey, but it had its moment of drizzling brown terror. Little Strafa took us over a small plaza just in time for the opening salvo of a neighborhood fireworks show. We were not high up. Rockets cracked past. They exploded overhead. I squealed. Orchidia strained to keep her response inside. Moonblight muttered in some weird Other Race language and went right on keeping her eyes shut.

  Explosions above betrayed us to the people below. Most decided we must be part of the entertainment. A few beetle-browed morons yelled for somebody to jump.

  Idiots! Karenta’s richest resource is stupidity.

  We settled onto Macunado. Two out of two witch women instantly declared, “We are being watched.” They pointed, not in the same direction.

  “The house is,” I agreed. I waved to Preston Womble. He waved back, making no effort to be discreet. I didn’t see Elona Muriat. Maybe she’d gone to the riverfront for the fireworks.

  A second party was less easy to identify. They might represent Belinda Contague or General Block. They were more professional than Womble, but barely so. They would rather be off watching fireworks, too.

  Singe and Strafa paid no mind. Singe hustled to the door. She used her key. Little Strafa followed her inside. I was right behind with Brownie, still napping. Moonblight and Orchidia, with mutts, brought up the rear.

  Penny emerged from Singe’s office. It was rare that anyone came into the house without being admitted by somebody already inside. She reddened immediately.

  Singe barked, “You have been into my books again!”

  “I was reading a story to Hagekagome. She likes stories. Where have you all been? We’re going to miss the fireworks.”

  That was a diversion. Her real interest was Little Strafa.

  Hagekagome, meanwhile, slipped past Penny, around Singe and Little Strafa, and glommed onto me. “Missed you! Missed you so much!” She hugged me hard with one arm while running her other hand over Brownie and sniffing. Brownie opened one eye lazily, gave Hagekagome’s face a big wet lick.

  Little Strafa said, “My, my.” And to the sorceresses, “I see what happened. I think I get the mechanism. Grandmother overlooked natural law completely when she constructed her spell suite.”

  Orchidia nodded. “Yes. It seems not to have occurred to her that if she regressed you, the regressed time and emotion would have to go elsewhere, into someone equally important.”

  Believe it or not, I understood part of that, but the insight didn’t stick.

  Strafa asked, possibly with a touch of concern or jealousy, “So, who is she, then? And if she is from twenty years ago, how come she isn’t as old as you?”

  Ouch.

  There was a new experience. I’d never seen Strafa jump into a big, steaming pile like that. That was more like something Kevans would do. Neither Tara Chayne nor Orchidia was pleased. The latter obviously considered reminding Strafa that she had kids the same age as Kevans.

  Both sorceresses chose to make allowances.

  There was enough grown-up Strafa in my girl to remind her that you don’t yank the beards of short-tempered older women, even unintentionally.

  She didn’t show much more maturity with Hagekagome, though.

  “Hey, you. That’s my man you’re climbing all over. Get off him. Stop rubbing yourself against him.”

  She made it sound more intimate and sensual than it was.

  Whatever had happened, it wasn’t simple and just physical. Hagekagome, honestly, was just trying to snuggle closer.

  Tara Chayne, ever more practical than I expected, suggested, “Why don’t we think of a nice, private place where we can take the girls to watch the fireworks? And talk. It’s almost midnight.”

  Almost time for the waterfront show. “Good idea. Strafa? Are you strong enough to make two more trips fast?”

  Strafa eyed me like she wondered why I’d ask such a dumb question.

  Inspiration had overwhelmed me.

  “Back to the street, then. Everyone.” Dogs yawned, still loafing in people’s arms.

  People moved without asking a bunch of questions. I appreciate that when it’s me wanting to get things done.

  “We’re outside,” Moonblight said. “Now what?”

  “Get into the place you were before, with your mutt. Orchidia, give yours to Hagekagome and put her in your place. Singe, same with Penny. We’ll fly. You lock the door. Strafa will come right back for you.”

  Singe didn’t like the plan. Orchidia, though, understood. Singe chose to defer to her wisdom, though she couldn’t help saying, “Do not do anything stupid before I get there.”

  “Hearing you five by five, Mom.”

  Singe didn’t care where we were headed. She figured I could do something dumb and inconvenient anywhere.

  Orchidia chivied everyone in tight around Strafa, who rotated to face me again, adding something extra as a message to Hagekagome, who never noticed. I was embarrassed about being the object of jealousy between children—even though, in a way, both were really my own age.

  Singe was locking the door as we lifted off.

  Neither Dean nor the Dead Man had made themselves evident at all.

  I hoped no watcher got a wild hair and tried to break in. They might actually get away with something now.

  Strafa whispered, “To the ridge in the cemetery?”

  “You know my mind perfectly.”

  “I am your wife. I will be your wife.” Stated with absolute conviction and an understood “No matter what!” “The view will be a little remote, but there won’t be any crowding. Not even the ghosts will get in the way of our conversation.”

  My wife. There might be some social difficulties till she looked old enough for the job. Say, another three or four years. Plenty of girls get married, to get out of the house, by age fifteen. They wait five more years after that, even their overly protective fathers start calling them old maids.

  Maybe by the time Little Strafa was ready for a real husband, she’d want someone a little more spry than the antique fart that I would be.

  117

  The big fireworks show always takes place on the waterfront at the foot of the Street of the Gods. The actual launching is done from barges anchored out. That’s safer. Maybe once a decade somebody screws up, does something royally stupid, and all the fireworks on a barge explode at once, resulting in a dead stupid guy who takes along any friends dumb enough to work with him, plus countless catfish whose deaths are less in vain because they get to participate mightily in numerous All-Souls feasts.

  The barges were a lesson hard-learned. A century ago a thousand people died in a Great Fire following a fireworks mishap.

  TunFaire has had half a dozen Great Fires over the ages.

  It was chilly on the ridge. The dogs woke up and gamboled a bit, making plenty of noise. I found a good place to sit. There was moonlight enough to limn the city skyline. Chattaree’s spires stood out. A tail of smoke still leaned west from the cathedral, a little orange and red at its root.

  Penny and Hagekagome settled beside me, right and left, crowding in for warmth. Penny said, “I should have thought about coats.”

  Behind us, Tara Chayne chuckled. “Then you wouldn’t have an excuse.”

  The first shell went up a few minutes later. The scattered fireworks we’d seen earlier were neighborhood efforts or kid stunts. I said, “I heard the Crown is kicking in this year.”

  Tara Chayne responded, “The army donated several tons of surplus.”

  Whoa! That could
get showy if it included anything besides signal rockets. What they threw up at enemy Windwalkers and broom riders, flying thunder lizards, or anything else that might attack from above would be showier and louder than anything civilians ever saw.

  Tara Chayne settled to her knees and hams behind me, close enough for me to feel her warmth. Hakekagome wasn’t shy about snuggling up and getting a two-hand death grip on my left arm. Penny maintained a careful little gap. Nasty old Tara Chayne whispered, “Make a memory, girl,” and pushed her.

  Wild dogs came out of the dark. They invested no time in greeting rituals. They just made themselves comfortable. Brownie had made herself at home in my lap already.

  Then the first army star shell went up. It didn’t throw off fancy colors, just created a globe of ferociously deadly lesser fireballs that expanded more than a hundred yards before the fade began. No magic there, just chemistry. Chemistry able to sear holes through half an inch of steel were anyone strong enough to carry that much armor aloft.

  The fire faded with “oohs,” and “aahs,” muted by distance.

  The next shell was also surplus, less obviously dramatic. It created a cloud lighted by an inner fire that spun off lightning bolts. Those would have made passage problematic for anything sharing that airspace.

  Some of the cemetery mutts raised their heads, flicked their ears, made soft, interrogative noises. Brownie answered with a sound closer to a purr than anything normally made by a dog. The others dropped their chins back onto their paws.

  Little Strafa dropped out of the night with Singe and Orchidia, Singe straining to appear unflustered. Clearly, the ladies had shared a lively conversation while they were airborne.

  Orchidia announced, “We ran into some gargoyles. They lit out. They didn’t want to talk.”

  Strafa said, “They weren’t dumb enough to try anything. But they did curse us in their own dialect.”

  They had a language?

  Orchidia said, “They were looking for friends who never came home from a job in the city. They may have blamed us.”

  Singe asked, “What have we missed?” She eyed Hagekagome and Penny fiercely. Little Strafa also gave Penny a dark look.

  “They just started.”

  Singe bullied a couple of mutts and made herself a place beside Penny. Orchidia did the same by Hagekagome, even laying a hand on the pretty girl’s back. Hagekagome seemed pleased. Little Strafa made her place behind me, on her knees like Tara Chayne. She pushed Moonblight over behind Penny but still stayed partly behind Hagekagome. She didn’t do or say anything to the pretty girl. The pretty girl paid no attention to her. She stayed where she was, snuggled up tight.

  Over my left shoulder I said, “So you were actually looking out for me the last couple days?”

  The fireworks began to pick up.

  “After I figured out who I was. Jiffy helped me with that.”

  Orchidia said, “Jiffy would be the big guy.”

  “Um.” I sort of figured.

  “At first I didn’t know anything. I headed for Grandmother’s house. I guess that was instinct. I didn’t know why, or who she was. It just seemed like the place to go.” She rested her hands on my shoulders. They were shaky.

  I said, “I’ve worked some of it out, but I can’t get it to make sense without figuring in truly boggling levels of incompetence.”

  “Then you don’t have it figured out,” Orchidia said. “Though you’re right about the incompetence.”

  A colorful barrage fixed our attention briefly; then Moonslight took it up. “Any sense anything made would likely do so only if you’d spent your life on the Hill. Only somebody who thinks like Constance Algarda could have done what she did to abort Meyness Stornes’s ambitions.”

  “She knew about him?”

  “Not specifically. She sensed a new tournament taking shape. She’d been watching for it. She called us in. Like everybody else, though, she thought that Meyness hadn’t come home from the Cantard.”

  Strafa said, “I never made it to Grandmother’s house. I ran into Jiffy and Min. They saw that I was scared and confused and crying and didn’t know who I was, or where. They thought they were being kind by not letting me get to Grandmother. They had just come away from her and thought she was too wicked for any little girl to be around.”

  Probably true, that. “What were they doing there?”

  “She hired them to investigate her granddaughter’s future husband, but she paid them so much up front that they were suspicious. Min knew somebody she could pay to do the spying while she and Jiffy found out what Grandmother was really up to. For some reason Jiffy decided he had to stick with me all the time.”

  He fell in love at first sight and wanted to protect her, that’s why. Strafa always had that appeal. It was one of her hidden powers and, possibly, the one ambitious Meyness really wanted most. Surely it would be massively more potent with Strafa looking like a lost, bewildered, vulnerable little girl.

  I had no trouble understanding Jiffy being pulled in, especially if he was no brighter than he seemed.

  “I tried to warn you one time, but I didn’t really know what I was talking about then. You didn’t pay attention, anyway. You were distracted . . .” Her hands tightened on my shoulders. “Anyway . . .”

  A barrage interrupted. As it faded, Moonblight said, “Constance went almost as dark as Meyness in order to ruin his tournament.”

  Orchidia said, “Because she was thinking forever. She’d have no trouble justifying it to herself if she couched it as a final solution.”

  Tara Chayne said, “You’re right, Garrett, thinking that Strafa’s death was accidental, the way it worked out. I’m sure Constance intended something almost as ugly visually but slightly less permanent. She probably wanted it to look like Strafa was beyond the grasp of the Operators. That would shake their scheme to its roots. She would hunt them down while they were confused, with help from you and your friends. You would want revenge. But when she got Min together with Strafa to make the sacrifice, something went wrong. Min should have died and Strafa should have gone into a state mimicking death that would relax eventually. I’m sure you’re right about that missile. Constance would have worked on it for weeks, refining the spells and layering them on for timed release. But it bounced off a bone inside Min and took out Strafa for real.”

  “Yeah.” Not quite incompetence, that. More like malicious Fortune. We saw absurd stuff like it all the time during the war. “So, after that she let the scam run anyway, but she ducked out on us by faking a stroke.”

  Tara Chayne said, “The stroke was real, it just wasn’t as bad as she made out.”

  “So . . . let me get this. Vicious Min is alive but she should be dead. Shadowslinger meant to murder her when she hired her. My Strafa is dead, but Min’s murder was supposed to make it so she could be revived.”

  Tara Chayne, Orchidia, and Little Strafa agreed: That was the exact situation.

  “So, what’s the deal with this Strafa? And where does Hagekagome fit? Or does she?”

  The pretty girl answered the mention of her name by trying to snuggle closer.

  “She fits,” Orchidia said.

  118

  Tara Chayne said, “Here is where the theory gets esoteric. The practical aspects of what happened may take years of study to work out.”

  “Since it looks like you all are finally willing to talk about this stuff, why not fill me in even where you don’t think I’ll understand? I can fool you sometimes.”

  Orchidia said, “Strafa, Singe, and I talked this over on the way here. Singe believes that the smoothest road forward is the direct one.”

  “Thank you.” Three large goat carts would have been needed to haul that load of sarcasm.

  Singe said, “Don’t make me reconsider.”

  Her sense of humor is atrophied. Better not risk her going totally serious.

  Little Strafa said, “When Grandmother’s spell activated, it not only did what she wanted it to, but did w
hat the laws of nature required. She hadn’t taken those enough into account, probably because she never looked past what she wanted right now.”

  Orchidia said, “Constance is a master. Her spell suite would have performed exactly as designed if that bolt had struck the sacrifice’s heart. But once it ricocheted into the protection Strafa was trying to weave—”

  Moonblight interrupted. “That’s what made the missile stray. Strafa being Strafa, she probably tried to protect Min first.”

  Little Strafa said, “I can reclaim no memory of anything that happened between the time I left Garrett that morning and when I ran into Jiffy and Min. I’m not sure how many hours or days I lost, then gained by going back.”

  Definitely weird, that great leap backward.

  They were picking at something I thought we had covered before. Then I saw that there was more to it. Why did we have Hagekagome and Little Strafa? “Was Strafa supposed to be regressed?”

  Tara Chayne said, “No. A temporal tremor created her and the other girl, both.”

  “Out of legend,” Orchidia said, harkening back.

  “Huh?”

  She indicated Hagekagome. “That has happened before. In folklore.”

  Tara Chayne said, “I’m sure the point of the exercise, for Constance, was a false death for Strafa that would make the Operators scramble to replace her in time to do the Ritual tonight.”

  I didn’t get that. The midnight changeover from Day of the Dead to All-Souls might be particularly potent, but I suspected that the Ritual did not have to happen at any specific hour.

  Maybe midnight tonight was just the best time to do it using a skeleton crew.

  Orchidia said, “Meyness apparently wasn’t that distraught about missing the chance to harvest the power of TunFaire’s only Windwalker.”

  “Could that be because Furious Tide of Light had no healing powers to mention?”

  “Ah. Yes.” Cold, cold. The Black Orchid had emerged. I tried recalling Dane and Deanne from the heyday of the Faction. Had they shown any talent for healing?

  They hadn’t impacted my consciousness much. The talent I recalled was one for shaping life-forms. They had helped the Faction create monster bugs. “I see what he must have been thinking.”