Mike lifted the glass and considered the lips for the thousandth time. He had given the artist very precise instructions and even a photograph. And in almost every way the artist had caught Mike’s vision, or surpassed it. That, and the secrecy with which the picture was made, was why he’d been paid a fee four times his normal. But if the artist had one flaw, it was in lips. He almost invariably used his wife as a model for his art, and she had a very definite Hapsburg lip. Oh, pretty, yes, but not right. Not for this painting. Everywhere else the image was perfection. A way to ensure that no matter what, Mike would never forget that face. But the lips were creeping in, erasing the image of them caressing his chest, his stomach…
He lifted the glass, realized it was mostly ice, and poured in more Elijah Craig. Hey, you couldn’t fly on just one wing.
Or two. Or a dozen or a thousand. At this point, the bottles lined one wall of the small room.
“When the mound reaches the very sky,” Mike said, not looking at the bottles.
There was a tap on the door and he pressed a solenoid, dropping a steel plate over the painting. Then he hit the release on the door.
“Come.”
“Kildar,” Mother Savina said diffidently. “There is a call from Colonel Pierson.”
“You can tell Colonel Pierson to fuck off, with my compliments,” Mike slurred. “And tell him to tell his boss the same thing.”
“Yes, Kildar,” Mother Savina said, closing the door.
Mike pressed the solenoid again, locked the door, and took another sip.
“When the mound reaches the sky. When the mound reaches the sky. When the mound reaches the sky. That’s when I’ll talk to fucking Pierson or his boss. When the mound reaches the sky.”
Chapter One
“Anybody got a fucking clue?”
The meeting was unusual. The group had all met each other before, even had meetings together, but there was one person missing and that threw the whole balance out.
Nielson looked around at the faces, searching for an answer to his question.
All six of the Keldara Fathers were present as well as two of the Mothers.
The Keldara were an ancient race of mountain warriors, descendants of the Norse guards of the Byzantine emperors, the Varangians. Marooned by the flow of history as the empire receded, they had endured a series of conquerors over the years but always maintained their traditions. Forced, like the Ghurkas and the Kurds, to be farmers for survival, they had, nonetheless, kept up their warrior tradition. In part this was due to a quiet and subtle breeding program.
Over the years they had had many “lords” occupy the caravanserai where the meeting was taking place. Some of them were courtiers exiled from centers of power but most had been foreign adventurers attached to whatever empire “owned” the Keldara at the time. The courtiers didn’t tend to last. They died mysteriously of diseases or sudden heart attacks or hunting accidents.
The other lords, the warriors, well, “a soldier that won’t fuck, won’t fight.” Those lords, naturally, wanted to sample the beautiful Keldara girls. And they were beautiful, so much so that people who met them commented on it constantly. Most such lords assumed the right as part of their position.
The Keldara had made that right their own, though, sending only girls who were about to be married and also in their period of maximum fertility. And they had insisted, quietly, subtly, but very determinedly, that the “lord” pay for his “rights” by presenting a dowry to the young lady.
Called the “Rite of Kardane,” over the centuries it had been used to carefully breed to dozens of different races, but every bit of that genetics had been from proven warriors. Those that weren’t… Well, so many accidents can befall a person.
Tartar eyes, a legacy of Genghiz’s hordes, blond and red hair from the Norse, black from the Turks and Ottomans; the men were powerful and handsome, fell beyond belief in battle; the women gorgeous and fey and nearly as dangerous.
But they needed their lord, their Kildar. They needed his genes, yes, but very nearly as good sat in the room with them. What they needed, most, was his leadership and the knowledge that each generation had brought to the Keldara of the best, most modern, way to destroy his enemies. The Keldara had been axemen from the North, bow-men riders and armored knights in their time. They had swung swords and fired long jazeels. They lived on the cutting edge of the blade; whatever would kill the most enemies was fine by them.
Now they armed themselves with M4s and machine guns, MP-5s and sniper rifles. Their armor was Kevlar and composite.
None of it was any good without the Kildar, though.
“I could beat him up,” Master Chief Charles Adams said.
The burly and bald-headed former SEAL had known the Kildar for years, since both were in BUDS together in the infamous Class 201. They’d been on the same team, briefly, then the Kildar had gone off to teach meats while Adams climbed the ladder of rank. Adams had next run into his old buddy in a stinking underground fortress in Syria, finding him shot to ribbons after holding off, with very little support, a Syrian commando battalion.
Later his “friend” had called him up and asked him to assemble a team and come train some weird group of mountain people in the country of Georgia.
Adams had been hanging out ever since. The Keldara were great people, the scenery was awesome, the living conditions, given that there were three hookers in-house, were great and the beer was fucking awesome.
He acted as the Kildar’s field second and had been at his side for several hairy ops. But it wasn’t the ops, directly, that had led to this fuck-up. Just one fucking casualty. You’d think a big guy could get over one fucking casualty, no matter how good a piece of ass it had been.
“I don’t think that would help,” Colonel David Nielson said dryly.
The colonel was a former infantry and civil affairs officer, Ranger tabbed, airborne qualified and once an instructor at the War College. The only professional officer in the group, he acted as the Kildar’s chief of staff. Short, with black hair going gray and green eyes that worked remarkably well on the ladies, he was about ready to go for the master chief’s suggestion.
“It’d help me,” Adams argued. “I’m about sick of his pouting.”
“The Kildar is soul damaged,” Father Kulcyanov said wheezily. The oldest remaining Father, Kulcyanov was a veteran of WWII, in the Red Army. He’d been in every major campaign, to include Stalingrad, and had so many medals he kept them in a very large box. In addition, he acted as the Keldara’s high priest. Given that that position had to be held by a warrior, it made sense. “It has happened before.”
“I hate to say this, but I have to question this whole Rite thing,” Captain Kacey Bathlick said. One of the pilots recently hired to support the Keldara, she knew she was the most junior member of the group, at least in experience. But not only had she proven her merits on the last mission, she wasn’t the sort to just keep her mouth shut. And, hell, Gretchen had been her crew-chief. She was pissed about her getting blown away but she wasn’t sitting crying in her fucking room! She’d just sent the Chechens who did it to meet Allah. Blasted the hell out of them, actually. “I mean, I get the whole point and the history. But fraternization is never a good idea.”
“That is, unfortunately, a point that is past,” Anastasia Rakovich pointed out. The “house manager” for the Kildar, she was a former harem slave and harem manager hired to fulfill much the same role. She had more or less inserted herself into the position of “house manager” since the Keldara housekeeper, Mother Savina, was less than experienced in managing the household of a lord. Anastasia had been a junior manager from the time she was seventeen and the manager of an Uzbek sheik’s household from the time she was twenty-one. Still only twenty-seven, she was model beautiful with long blonde hair and blue eyes, much like the late Gretchen Mahona. But while she regularly warmed the Kildar’s bed, and he her back, given that she was a high-level sexual masochist, the Kildar had never been infatuated with her as he had become with Gretchen. “And, frankly, if he’d had more time with her the hurt might have been less. Or more, I don’t know,” she added with a sigh.