Though excited by the prospect of knowledge, uncertainty weakened Larson's grip on his sword. "What's the catch?"
Gaelinar tossed his towel aside and raised his eyebrows uncomprehendingly.
" What's this dream-reading process do to me? How does it work?"
"Do to you?" Gaelinar caught the sides of the bowl. "It doesn't do anything to you. And you might just as well bid me cast the protective circle. If you want to learn combat come to me." He patted his sword hilts. "For explanations of magic ask Silme."
Finding the answer unsatisfying, Larson scowled. Gaelinar lifted the bowl of water and carried it to a dented tin bucket on one of the chairs. As water splashed from basin to bucket, disturbing a thin film of oil which had settled on the surface, the Kensei softened. "Silme wouldn't suggest anything to hurt you. I think you know that."
Larson said nothing. So many times in Vietnam he placed his life in the hands of men whose morals he questioned. Now, he balked before the trust of the woman of his dreams and the man who gave his new being direction. "Yes," he admitted. "I know that."
"Good." Smiling, Gaelinar refilled the basin from the pitcher and left it on the tabletop. "Wash up and get some sleep. See you in the morning." He turned and strode through one of the portals, pulling the curtain closed behind him.
Gingerly, Larson removed his tunic, worn thin as a favored tee shirt though he'd owned it only three days. He moistened a rag and scrubbed his unfamiliar body, paying particular attention to his armpits, which were hairless, and his genitals which he had already determined looked normal by human standards.
Minor comparisons and benign memories of showers and flush toilets busied Larson's mind while he prepared for bed. But after he Finished his scrub bath, gathered his tunic and sword belt, and settled into bed, thoughts descended upon him. He pictured a kindly old woman and a man stooped and tanned from years in the field. Between them, he imagined a snub-nosed boy, like his baby brother Timmy, and a girl beautiful as Silme, but with a wide-eyed innocence only youth can grant.
Larson fought the idea like madness, but he imagined the four again, crushed like roses after a broken romance. Blood colored the cold, stone floor. Limbs bent like fragile stems. Memory awak- ened, triggered others in a spreading circuit. Bodies sprawled in limp piles, pinned to walls in death, shattered to red chaos. Faces lay locked in permanent accusation, lacking ears, prizes claimed for the gruesome pride of death collectors. And we were all death collectors.
Larson kept his eyes open, letting the scenes wash across the rain-warped ceiling, waiting for them to play out and leave him the tranquillity of sleep. But peace remained elusive. Remembrance of Bramin's sorceries surfaced in a searing rush, and past horrors washed to a waste of grayness. Agonies Larson dared not wish upon Satan condensed to a dully throbbing reminder that Silme's family had experienced it all and worse. Surely death was the kindest of Bramin's atrocities.
Larson forced his mind to cheerier topics. He remembered his father and their yearly New Hampshire trips to hunt deer and grouse. But even then, his thoughts betrayed him. Larson recalled the phone call which pulled him from college midterms. His father had been killed, the victim of a drunk driver. He left nothing. To relieve their mother's financial burden, his older sister married, and Al Larson quit school to join the army. / wonder if Mother knows I am dead.
A noise startled Larson from his nightmare of memory. Relieved, he lay alternately sweating and chilled while his trained senses identified sound and location. He heard it again, coming from his left over toward Silme and Brendor. It was the gentle creak of floorboards beneath weight shifting with deliberate stealth.
Larson hit the floor in a crouch. His groping hands found his sword belt in the darkness, and he worked Valvitnir from its sheath without a sound. The blade trembled questioningly as he pressed it to his naked chest, hoping to shield the steel from residual light which might reveal him. Taking care that the inseams of his doeskin pants did not rub together, he pressed to the wall and worked his way toward the portal of his bedroom.
Again, Larson heard movement. Carefully, he flicked back an edge of his curtain and examined the main room. The lantern had burned out, and the suite lay in blackness. A light in the corner bedroom discolored its drawn curtain in a central circle, marred by wrinkles in the fabric. Beyond, Larson heard a sandal scrape wood and a pained human sob.
Larson stalked the sound, acutely aware of each of his own motions. Well aware any person skilled enough to harm Silme could easily kill him, Larson still continued, relying on surprise to even the odds. Positioned to spring, he snaked the sword forward and tipped an edge of the curtain up. The linen folded aside to reveal a slight figure pacing before a candle on a bed table. It was Silme.
Larson dropped his sword and stepped into the bedroom. Silme whirled abruptly. Her hair, hung in a cascade of golden tangles, and her eyes looked red and swollen. A tear slid halfway down her cheek before she caught it with a finger and flipped it away. Though stripped of pretenses and pride, she seemed every bit as beautiful to Larson.
He caught her to his chest, and she, at first, resisted. Then grief broke in a flurry of tears. She wept for her family, for all the innocent victims of Bramin's hatred, and for the men of Midgard fated to die in Loki's Chaos. Her tears glided down Larson's chest. He pressed his arms around her, muttering senseless comforts. Her warmth raised him to a dizzying height of passion, and it took no small amount of will to suppress the urge to force his desires upon her.
Shamed by the lust incited by Silme's grief, Larson said nothing. Between sobs which shook the sorceress' body, he vowed vengeance on the red-eyed half-man responsible for her pain. For his own peace, he swore he would earn Silme's love and respect and one day bed the sorceress who was sapphire Dragonrank from Forste -Mar.
Chapter 4
Wolfslayer
"Brother fights with brother, they butcher each other; daughters and sons incestuously mix; man is a plaything of mighty whoredoms; an axe-time, sword-time shields shall be split; a wind-age, a wolf-age, before the World ends."
– The Spaewife's Song
The dream-reader crossed the barren tract before her cottage and studied the main street of Forste -Mar through cataract-hazed vision. Four figures approached, too distant to discern through her aged eyes. Yet she identified her visitors without mortal sight. The woman at the lead glowed with a life aura bright as a barn fire, surely Dragonrank and therefore unmistakably Silme. Beside her walked a boy suffused by light so pale the dream-reader attributed the illusion to reflections of Silme's glory and her own near blindness.
Behind Silme strode her bodyguard of several years, the ronin, Gaelinar. To believe the rumors, he'd fought a thousand duels in the Far East without a loss and had been lured to the North by stories of fearless pirates commanding longboats carved in dragon form. No one knew how Silme had persuaded the Kensei to her cause, but his loyalty was beyond question.
The dream-reader knew the sorceress' last companion from gossip exchanged in the village market. The citizens named him a light elf. But even through diseased eyes which blurred Larson to an outline, the dream-reader found little comparison between him and the slight, giggling elves who whisked through her cottage on infrequent visits. His tread was heavy as a man's, his manner cautious and careworn.
As the four people crossed the ground before her cottage, the dream-reader lowered her head so her hood might keep her wrinkled face in shadow. She spread her arms. Wind caught the edges of her sleeves, drawing them from wrists thin as broom handles. Affectations were unnecessary before the sorceress, Silme, but the dream-reader assumed her position from decades of habit.