They're funny that way—plenty willing to trek all over the Cantard risking themselves for glory and personal gain, but...
I don't understand them any more than I understand frogs. But I'm handicapped by my low birth.
Kayean's father had been one of the Syndics who dwelt in the hills, with a wife, four servants, and eight kids. Kayean was the oldest.
Memories returned, bringing a certain nostalgia, as I guided the rented carriage up and down pacific lanes.
"What're you looking all moony-eyed about?" Morley demanded. We had left the triplets at the inn, an action the wisdom of which I still doubted, though Morley assured me he had not left a farthing between them.
"Remembering when. Young love. First love. Right here in these hills." I had not filled him in on every little detail. A bodyguard did not need to know all the sordid angles.
"I'm a bit of a nostalgic romantic myself, but I never figured you for one, Garrett."
"Me? The knight in rusty armor always clanking out to rescue undeserving maidens or to do battle with the dragons of some lunatic's imagination? I don't qualify?"
"You see? Romantic images. Though why should you mind working for nuts if they have money to spend? You can milk a man with an obsession like a spider milks a fly."
"I don't work that way."
"I know. You really want to rescue maidens and champion underdogs and lost causes—as long as you get enough grease to keep the joints in the armor from freezing up."
"I like a beer sometimes, too."
"You've got no ambition, Garrett. That's what's wrong with you."
"You could write a book about all the things you've found wrong with me, Morley."
"I'd rather write one about the things that are right. It'd be a lot less work. Just a short little fable. ‘He's kind to his mother. Doesn't beat his wife. His kids never have to go in the snow barefoot.' "
"Sarky today, aren't we?"
"I'm off my feed. How much longer are we going to be looking for the ghosts of might-have-been?"
Not only sarky but a little too perceptive. I supposed I might as well confess. "I'm not being romantic. I'm lost."
"Lost? I thought you said you knew these parts like the back of your hand."
"I did. But things have changed. All the trees and bushes and stuff that were landmarks have grown or been cut down or—"
"Then we'll just have to ask somebody, won't we? Yo!" he shouted at a gardener clipping a hedge. "What's the name of the guy we're looking for, Garrett?" The gardener stopped working and gave us the fisheye. He looked like a real friendly type. Poison you with his smile.
"Klaus Kronk." The first name was pronounced claws with a soft sibilant, but Morley took it for a nickname.
He climbed down and approached the gardener. "Tell me, my good fellow, where can we find the Syndic Claws Kronk?"
The good fellow gave him a puzzled look that turned into a sneer. "Let's see the color of your metal, darko."
Morley calmly picked him up and chucked him over his hedge, hopped over after him and tossed him back, thumped on him a little, twisted limbs and made him groan, then said, "Tell me, my good fellow, where can we find the Syndic Claws Kronk?" He wasn't even breathing hard.
The gardener decided that at least one of us was a psychopath. He stammered directions.
"Thank you," Morley said. "You have been most gracious and helpful. In token of my appreciation I hope you will accept this small gratuity." He dropped a couple of coins into the man's palm, closed his fingers over them, then rejoined me aboard our conveyance. "Take the first left and go all the way to the top of the hill."
I glanced back at the gardener, still seated beside the lane. A glint of mischief sparked in his swelling eyes.
"You think it's wise to make enemies out here, Morley?"
"We won't get any comebacks from him. He thinks I'm crazy."
"I can't imagine why anybody would think that about you, Morley."
We had only one turn left to make. A cemetery flanked both sides of the road. "You know where you are now?" Morley asked. "A landmark like this ought to be plenty memorable."
"More memorable than you know. I think our gardener friend got us. We'll see in a minute." I turned between the red granite pillars that flanked the entrance to the Kronk family plot.
"He's dead?"
"We're about to find out."
He was. His was the last name incised in the stone of the obelisk in the center of the plot. "Got it during the last Venageti incursion, judging from the date," I said. "Fits what I remember about him, too. He would get out and howl for Karenta."
"What do we do now?"
"I guess we look for the rest of the family. He's the only one who's established residence here."
He lifted one eyebrow.
"I can find my way from here. Kayean and I used to walk up here at night to, uh... "
"In a graveyard?"
"Nothing like tombstones to remind you how little time you have for the finer things in life."
"You humans are weird, Garrett. If you want an aphrodisiac, there's one that the sidhe tribes of the Benecel river basin make from the roots of something like a potato plant. It'll keep your soldier at attention for hours. Not only that, but when you use it you're guaranteed there's no way you're going to become a papa."
Vegetarian sexual aids? Some people take good things too far.
22
Starting from the cemetery I was able to find the Kronk place with only one miscue. From the lane the place next door looked more like the one I remembered than the correct one. We were partway up the flagstones when I spied the peacock cages under the magnolias.
"About turn and march," I said. "One house shy of our mark." I recalled how, if Kayean was not very careful sneaking in and out, those peafowl would raise six kinds of hell and there went the evening if it happened on the sneak-out side. Her old man knew what was going on but was never quick enough to catch her. She had been fast on her feet.
I explained that to Morley as we retreated to the lane.
"How the hell did a slob like you ever meet a quail living in a place like this?"
"I met her at a party for bachelor officers the admiral put on. All the most eligible young ladies of Full Harbor were there."
He gave me an overly dramatic look of disbelief.
I confessed, "I was there waiting tables."
"It must have been animal magnetism and the air of danger and forbidden fruit surrounding an affair with a member of the lower classes." He said it deadpan. I could not decide whether I should be irritated or not.
"Whatever it was, it was the greatest thing that had happened in my young life. Hasn't been much since to eclipse it, either."
"Like I said, a romantic." And there he let it lay.
"Lot of changes since I was here," I said. "The place has been completely done over."
"You sure it's the right one?"
"Yeah." All the memories assured me that it was. We had walked these grounds under the watchful chaperonage of a patient and loving mother who had seen the whole romance as a phase and would not have believed her eyes if she had walked in on us in the cemetery.
Morley took my word for it.
We were still fifty feet from the door when a man in livery stepped outside and came to meet us. "He don't look like he's glad we dropped by."
Morley grunted. "He don't look like your average houseboy, either."
He didn't. He looked like a Saucerhead Tharpe who was past his prime but still plenty dangerous. The way he fisheyed us said that, fancy clothes or not, we were not fooling him.
"Can I help you gents?"
I'd decided to go at it straight ahead, almost honest, and hope for the best. "I don't know. We're down from TunFaire looking for Klaus Kronk."