The Last Guardian of Everness Read online

  VII

  Wendy raised her head from the living light in Galen’s palm and saw the door from the hall silently swing open, with no hand touching it. Looming in the doorway was a ghastly black apparition, narrow-faced and starved, corpselike, dressed in armor of human bones and shrouded with floating blackness.

  Galen jerked his hand back into his pouch, quelling the light he held, and he brought up his spear in an en garde stance, weight balanced, legs slightly spread, knees flexed. His left hand, forward on the haft, held the gleaming weapon level; his right hand, near the spear butt, was in motion, so that the spearhead began to sway and circle, menacing, feinting.

  “You again!” shouted Wendy. “Get out of here!”

  Koschei stooped to brush his crown of dead men’s fingernails against the door frame as he floated into the room, his robes a cloud.

  “Necromancer, begone!” called out Galen. “By justice herself, I command you, depart! No hand here will unsheathe your gory blade! No heart here will bleed to fill the emptiness where once you kept your heart!”

  Koschei spoke in a cold voice, humming with echoes, as if he spoke from a distant world. “Son of Adam, not for battle come I now (to your good fortune, for my strength would utterly overwhelm and consume you), but to act as herald for one, more terrible than I, who comes now to claim you. The first father of your race, by mortal crime, has condemned all your kind as prey to him who follows me; your life, for that original sin, is forfeit. Do you deny this?”

  “I—I don’t know what you mean—”

  At that moment Wendy heard the distant sound of a ringing bell, perhaps from a church or clocktower, ringing.

  “I am a herald for one whom no one else can serve; having shed my humanity, I do not share the fate under which the first of men laid all his children.” Koschei raised one bony finger, pointing to the door, and spoke now in a louder voice: “Behold, ye spirits of the world, that he has not denied my word, and therefore he confesses and consents. Come, Death, and take his soul away! But see you do not shatter the little life he carries in his pouch; this is destined for his shed flesh, by the magic of the selkie who have touched him; he has worn their robes, they now wear his.”

  A great, black, taloned hand, with fingers longer than a tall man’s legs, reached in through the doorway, surrounded by a stinking cloud of darkness like a thundercloud. The hand was brown with layers of dried blood and gore, and a terrible, piercing cold radiated from it, so that the long black nails were dripping frost.

  While Galen stood paralyzed, the black hand closed around him, and Wendy caught a glimpse of Galen’s horrified face between the narrowing gaps of the closing fingers, like a face seen between the bars of a cage.

  Wendy gave out a shrill shout of fear and anger, threw aside her covers, and leaped up out of bed.

  As soon as her foot touched the floor, she sprang fully awake and blinking in the empty room. The hospital room looked the same, but there was no sign of Galen or Koschei or the terrible clawed hand.

  A square of moonlight from the window fell silently onto the floor, and, except for a growing sensation of dread, Wendy was alone.

  7

  Wounded

  of

  Old Wars

  I

  Raven, his muscular arms folded over his stomach as if he felt a knotted pain there, his shoulders slumped, his eyes staring, walked slowly from the intensive care unit. His steps were slow.

  “What have I done—by holy Katherine, what have I done . . .,” he muttered to himself over and over again in his native Georgian tongue.

  Ahead of him in the white halls, Raven saw a young mother escorting a little daughter away from a counter where the mother had been signing papers and forms. The girl looked cheerful, although her face was pale. A bouquet of balloons was floating next to her head, tied by brightly colored ribbons to her wrist.

  “There we go, sweetheart! Time to go home! Now we’re all better. Do you like your balloons?”

  The little girl smiled a smile of innocent joy and bobbed her wrist furiously to make the colored balloons wiggle and dance.

  Raven, drew away, unable to tolerate the sight. The halls felt stuffy and close about him. He pushed open a pair of doors and stepped out into the fresh nighttime air.

  Raven staggered over to a bench overlooking the parking lot and sat down, breathing heavily, elbows on knees, head hanging.

  “Tough night in there, eh?” said a rough voice.

  Raven turned his head. Next to the bench, in a wheelchair, sat a heavyset man. He was balding, thick chested, with powerful biceps, neck, and shoulder muscles. His legs were absurdly thin and small by comparison. He wore a crew cut, and had an upright posture and level gaze. He had scars: one on his cheek, one on his hand, others perhaps hidden by his shirt. His face was lined and weathered: he looked to be in his fifties, perhaps a well- preserved sixty.

  The man in the wheelchair pulled a metal flask out of his jacket. “Take a pull, son. Looks like you need it.” And he passed the flask to Raven, saying, “Careful. Strong stuff.”

  Raven sniffed the open cap of the metal flask. Just the aroma of the alcohol was so strong that it stung his eyes. Deliberately, he tilted back his head and took a long, deep swallow of the potent, clear liquor.

  It burned like raging fire in his throat. Raven neither coughed nor gasped, and he handed back the flask with a steady hand.

  The man gave Raven a brief inspection and nodded with approval.

  When the man sipped from the flask, he could not do so with Raven’s aplomb; he took a shallower drink and had to pull the flask away from his lips, gasping for breath, eyes watering.

  Raven shook his head, smiling, and put out his hand, gesturing for the flask.

  The other man silently handed it over, looking Raven eye-to-eye as he did so.

  Raven took another pull, twice as long as before, drinking liquid fire into his throat. With a flourish, he returned the flask to the other man; his cheeks flushed, but showing no other outward sign of distress.

  The man in the wheelchair, eyebrows raised, gave a long, low whistle of admiration.

  Raven nodded, a modest gesture of thanks.

  The other man smiled back, his smile a slight crease in an iron-harsh face. “Name’s Peter. Yours?”

  “Raven.”

  “Where’d you learn to hold your liquor like that, Dr. Raven?”

  “I was sailor on Greek freighter, Peter. I sailed the seas.”

  Peter grunted and nodded, taking another sip. “Good man.”

  “Ah.” Raven’s smile fell. He turned his face away to stare broodingly out at the lights of the parking lot, at the textured darkness of the bushes and trees beyond. “But I am not a good man. Not a good man at all.”

  “Mm? What’d you do?”

  “I made a man to die,” said Raven softly. “To let a beautiful little woman live. One of them had to die.”

  Peter passed him the flask. “Well, now. Doctors make those choices all the time. It’s hard. Damn hard, choices like that. Deciding who lives, who dies. I know.”

  Raven wondered why Peter mistook him for a doctor then realized he was still wearing the white lab coat he had stolen from the laundry earlier that evening to sneak into his wife’s room.

  “No,” said Raven. “It was not such a choice as that. The woman, she is my wife. The young man him, it is the same as if I have done murder. I murdered a man.” Raven drank and passed back the flask.

  “Yeah, I know what that’s like. You get over it.” Peter took a final sip from the flask, and opened his coat to replace it in an inner pocket. When his coat was open, Raven could see a heavy, long-barreled pistol the man carried beneath his coat in a shoulder holster.

  “But, let me tell you,” Peter continued. “No matter how bad it gets, no matter who lives and who dies, no matter how much you get hurt, you can take it. Your wife leaves? You can take it.

  “Your son gets involved in drugs and weird cults? You can take
it. Your father a nutcase? You can take it. You step on a landmine, and lose the use of both legs, no jogging, no rock climbing, no dancing, not anymore, not ever again? You can take it. Here’s the secret: as long as your conscience is clean, you can take it. Like you got three inches of armor plating between you and the world. Whatever goes on out there, long as your plating is intact, it’s never going to reach you inside, and you can take it. But if you do wrong, that ‘s it. Then the grenade is inside the armor plating, inside with you, to bounce all that shrapnel around inside there with you, and there’s no way to get out and get away from it, because you carry it with you. Man with a good conscience, even if he’s lost it all, he can take it; man with a bad conscience, even if he’s got everything in the world, he can’t take anything, and he’ll break. He’ll just break like a twig. You got me?”

  Raven did not move or respond except that his gaze grew hollow and blank, and, beneath his beard, his cheek grew pale.

  Peter said gruffly, “Tell me about this wife of yours you saved.”

  II

  Raven said, “My wife, she is crazy. Not sad or frightening crazy, but crazy just the same. Harmless crazy. She run around naked in the woods to see if she can remember how to fly. She talks to animals, and if you say animals no talk back, she laughs and says, well, that’s not their fault, is it? And she talks always about her father and mother.”

  Raven continued: “To hear her talk, her mother is the most beautiful and wise woman in the world, gracious and kind, and never to get angry or cross. And her father, she says he is a man like no other, a clever lawyer, an inventor, a builder of houses and healer of sickness. Such a genius, her father is! And filled with so many stories about his great deeds! She tells me of him and promises to take me to meet him, where he lives in his great mansion in California, but always the trip is put off. She is so pleased with how much she loves her father, how much he loves her. She tells everyone and all; such happy boasting!

  “I believed her, you know,” continued Raven. “Because I am thinking, this is America, after all. Land of Jefferson. Land of Edison. Are men brilliant at many things. Why not man like this, skilled at so much? Inventor, like Edison, architect, like Jefferson . . .”

  Peter said gruffly, “Sounds like that fellow in California, what’s his name? That inventor-surgeon who got fed up with being sued all the time, and became a lawyer, and he got fed up with all his bad press, so he started his own newspaper chain. Real rags to riches story; a real hero. Funny; I can’t remember his name. Any relation?”

  “I do not think any relation with anyone at all.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I tell you. I remember how Wendy invited many girls over from her university where she studies one day to have a bridal shower. I am not supposed to be there, you know, since I am a man. But one of the girls, her classmate, finds me before I am leaving, and asks me where the father is, of which she has heard so much. Such a great man! Will the father be at the wedding? And I do not know how to say. . .” Raven’s voice trailed off in misery.

  “Father’s dead?” guessed Peter.

  “No. Is worse. There is no father, no mother. No father who is genius; no mother of perfect beauty and sweetness. When I try to find the father before the wedding, I called on the phone to try to find him. To find records. No member of the bar as a lawyer; no medical school records; no architecture license. There is a mansion at the address Wendy knows, but no one has lived there for many years. I ask Wendy about these things, and she laughs and says her father is away, maybe visiting her mother. And after the wedding . . . after the wedding, Wendy says . . .”

  “What?”

  “Wendy says her father was at the reception (we had a reception to celebrate our elopement), that I shook his hand, that I spoke with him, and that I have forgotten it. I tell her, you know, she is an orphan, and maybe she is deluded. And she says, so what? Of course, I am mad little girl (she says), or why else is she marrying such a man like me and being ever so happy? That is what she said, how happy she was. How she laughed! So I do not look for the father anymore, since I am thinking, what does it matter?” Raven shook his head in sorrow.

  “Who paid for her college?” asked Peter.

  “Ah . . . strange. You know, I am not knowing how she pays for this. She owns many fine things, like a rich man’s daughter might own. I do not know. I do not know what to think about her. But I am very much in love with her. I would. . .” Raven was thinking of saying, I would do murder for her, but he could not say it.

  “Just ‘cause someone’s crazy, don’t mean you stop caring about them,” said Peter. “I know. I got one in the family.”

  III

  “They say you marry a woman like your mother. Not me. I tried to get the most practical, most hardheaded woman I could find. Emily’s her name. Practical. My old man is nuts, and I wanted to keep my son away from all nuttiness. Nuts but rich. When I was stationed overseas, Emily raised the kid all by herself. Months at a time. Years. Came time for the kid to go to boarding school and get some real schooling. Public schools in our part of the world were crap. We wanted to send him to a military academy, but it was expensive. Emily thought my dad could afford it; but Dad wouldn’t lend her the money unless she brought the kid and lived with him over the summers. I didn’t want my old man near the kid. I had standards. Not Emily. She was practical. And I was overseas. Nothing I could do about it.

  “You know when kids go through a certain age, when they won’t listen to anything their parents tell them? They go around reading books that prove they don’t exist, or that everything is nothing, and they think no one ever thought about it before. Because they’re trying to form their own ideas. Maybe you don’t know. Usually it’s healthy. Usually. But my old man got him just at that age.

  “Filled his head full of garbage. It’s his religion. Weird devil-worship, new age-type stuff. Our folks got chased out of England with the Pilgrims long time back. But they weren’t Puritans, no sir, not by a long shot.

  “So the kid listens to my dad, and pretty soon he’s taking drugs and staring into crystals and studying books on witchcraft.

  “Well, when I came home after my last tour, it was quite a scene. You see, I thought Emily’d side with me. But when I came home, it was without my legs working.

  “All those years in the hellhole of Vietnam, and I come out fine; but then, when I go off to some stinking shit-hole in the middle east—not even in a combat zone!—I get my kneecaps blown off. Fuck it. Now I get to sit it out the rest of my life. Emily didn’t like that. She was younger than me, and some of her good looks weren’t worn off yet, and she didn’t want to be chained up to a cripple the rest of her life. You’d be surprised how often it happens.

  “Me, I always thought you were supposed to stick by people. Stick by your men, stick by your friends, stick by your family. Stick by them even when it did you no good at all, even if you had to make a few sacrifices for it. Not Emily. She was practical. She hired a lawyer and gave me a divorce.

  “Maybe she figured I wouldn’t put up much of a fight. Well, she figured that one right. Whole thing tore the heart right out of me. And me, a fighter!

  “I don’t know where she got the money to hire that lawyer, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Dad put her up to it. ‘Cause she got the house and a healthy chunk of my veteran’s benefits, and custody of the kid. And then, of course, being young and pretty, she wanted to get married again, and didn’t want a teenage kid around the house to scare off any prospects. So he goes to live with Dad, getting further and further wrapped up in all this religious weirdness, until finally he ends up nutty as a fruitcake. And I can’t get him to come home. The judge told me that at the kid’s age, by the time I got back custody, the kid would be an adult anyway, if I tried to reopen the case. These things take years.”

  Raven said, “It is terrible thing to be lonely, I am thinking.”

  Peter nodded grimly. “It was months before anyone even informed me what wa
s going on here.”

  “Here?”

  “At the hospital. They didn’t phone me. I didn’t even know he was here at first. Maybe I’m not on the records as the father anymore. My kid has been in a coma since this spring. In August, I used to come by every day and sit next to him. Talk, or read. They say that helps. Maybe he could hear. Maybe not. And he’d just lay there, hooked up to those machines. And I realized it don’t matter. His religion. His nuttiness. None of it mattered, you know? ‘Cause I wanted him to live. I wanted him to wake up again. Even if he hates me for the rest of his life ‘cause of how I treated him, I’d rather have him awake, alive, healthy. And I realized this didn’t matter. . .” He tapped his useless legs with his hands.

  “I felt mighty sorry for myself for about a year after this happened. Maybe that’s one thing Emily couldn’t stand. Self-pity. But looking at the face of my little boy, laying in there, mostly dead, kept alive by a machine . . . Well, at least I was alive. I was up and about. I had more than my little boy. And you know what? Self-pity is just another name for selfishness. And I felt all that selfishness fall off of me when I sat there, day after day, looking at him. Know why? ‘Cause I would have traded places with my boy in a minute. I would have gone into a coma to let him live again. I would have done it for any of my men in the brush; why shouldn’t I do the same for my boy? And when you’re willing to give up your life for someone, you shouldn’t stop to bitch about his nutty ideas. You don’t have to see eye to eye with a person to love them. And I just wish my boy would wake up again so I could tell him that. That I love him. Just that.”

  “I hope your child will recover and have good health,” said Raven. “It is more sad for the young to be sick, you know?”

  “Yep. Few hours ago, they called me, said his condition had changed. New brainwave activity. Different from his old brainwave patterns. He went into a seizure. Started to wake up, but then his heart stopped. Took him to the emergency room. You might have seen him there. His name’s Galen. Galen Waylock.”