Wicked Bronze Ambition

375 Pages·2018·1.8 MB·English

by  Glen Cook

Glen Cook
Wicked Bronze Ambition
1
“Love sucks.”
“If you’re a vampire.” Strafa scattered covers as she struck, diving at the spot
on the side of my neck that triggers the reflex. Just the threat of the tickle kicks
me into a psycho self-defense mode.
She bounced away laughing, sat up, her eyes the color of stout flecked with
gold. Fair warning! Flee, Garrett, flee! Run for your sanity!
Being a skilled observer, I observed, “You’re not wearing anything.”
“I never wear anything to bed.”
“I know. But now I’m officially taking notice.”
“Ooh! You wicked man! I see how much you’ve noticed. Is that all on my
account?”
I grunted and tried pulling a sheet over me.
She laughed. “That’s why I do it.”
Yeah. So I’ll notice. So things will happen. The real devil wears nothing,
extremely well.
Strafa is as close to the perfect woman as this broke-down onetime Marine
can imagine. She’s beautiful. She’s always cheerful. She’s always ready, for
anything. She is fun to be with. She is fun to be around. She’s even rich. What
more could a man ask?
Well, a nicer band of in-laws would help.
The rich is because Strafa Algarda is the Windwalker, Furious Tide of Light,
one of TunFaire’s premier sorceresses. She has these immense, terrible powers
but very little interest in using them. The rest of her family, though. . Another
matter. Definitely another matter. They are weird and scary people, all. And I
was on the brink of being pulled in forever.
I dove, tackling her. She laughed. “Distract me all you want, but we still
have to go see Grandmother.”
“I’ll keep you here all day long.”
“Braggart. I’ll let you try tomorrow. But right now. .”
Right now time was running out. And even Furious Tide of Light dared not
make Shadowslinger wait, so it wasn’t long before we started the endless, too
brief two-block uphill trudge to Grandma’s house.
2
Strafa’s daughter, Kevans, let us in. Kevans has a lot of her father in her. She
isn’t as slim or beautiful as Strafa. And she insists on being sixteen going on
fifty around her mother. “Mom! You two are worse than a cage full of ferrets.
You’re old! Can’t you at least pretend to act your age?”
Old is a matter of viewpoint. Strafa was thirty-one, which made for
interesting generational math. I ignored it. I ignore the weird Algarda dynamic as
much as they let me.
I kept my mouth shut. If I stuck even one finger into the daughter-mother
competition, I’d get my arm ripped off and fed to me after one or the other beat
me with it.
Yes. The family was the downside to being engaged to the most wonderful,
perfect, ridiculously beautiful, loving woman in the world. There was no getting
out of having the in-laws included in the package.
Kevans and I get along fine when her mother isn’t around. I get along with
their father when Kevans and Strafa aren’t around. Barate is a smart guy. He
really thinks that I’m the best thing ever to happen to Strafa-though it didn’t
always used to be that way.
Nobody gets along with Grandmother Shadowslinger.
She works hard to make it that way. I am assured, however, that she thinks
well of me. As well as is possible, she being Shadowslinger. My most endearing
trait was that I was willing to make an honest woman of her spinster
granddaughter.
Strafa asked Kevans, “What kind of mood is she. .? Right. Stipulated. Stupid
question.”
“Foul. But not because of anything any of us did, for once.”
Like most of the more ferocious magic-users who dwell on the Hill,
Constance Algarda, commonly called Shadowslinger, occupied a vast, gloomy,
dark edifice that looked like ghouls and graveyard fetches had thrown it up more
than two hundred years ago. A parade of grim residents had installed countless
bad smells, dire dust, spiders with webbed accessories, and lots of random
clutter. Shadowslinger was not famous for her housekeeping. She was not your
cliche tubby little rosy-cheeked homemaker kind of grandmother.
Most of the smells actually existed only inside my imagination, but
Shadowslinger had fixed them there-while wearing a big, greasy, evil grin. A
reminder, she said, never making it clear of what. One odor I never failed to
catch was that of rotting flesh. It seeped out of the very walls.
Nobody else ever smelled it.
“She does it because she cares,” Strafa said. “What do you want to bet she
makes it go away after the wedding?” Her eyes were big and blue and filled with
self-deluding optimism.
I hunch my shoulders and take what I have to take. It’s the price of
admission to paradise.
Kevans told us we should follow her, then complained every step of the way
till we reached the room where Shadowslinger waited. Then the girl actually
smiled for a moment.
Kevans likes her grandmother, though I’ve never heard her say a good word
about the hag.
3
I was startled. Strafa squeaked. She was surprised, too.
Shadowslinger was not alone.
I’d never visited this room. It was big and comfortable and more civilized
than any I’d yet seen inside Shadowslinger’s suburb of Hell. There wasn’t a
single torture device, nor even one torturee, in sight. There were rich carpets,
richer tapestries, big, ridiculously comfortable chairs, and massive furniture. A
fire roared enthusiastically in a fireplace behind Grandmother, who was old
enough to be convinced that she was cold all the time. A brace of servants in
livery tended to the needs of her guests. I knew Barate, my father-in-law-to-be.
He had been half devoured by a monster chair. He had a bone china teacup to his
lips when we entered.
He had a relationship with his mother that was as difficult as Kevans’s was
with her mother. Every little motion he made mocked her unusual efforts toward
propriety.
There were another three people present. They were all older than me. Two
were older than Barate and might be as old as Shadowslinger herself. I didn’t
know them. Strafa did. She loosed a little gasp of surprise. I whispered, “Is this
good or bad?”
Her right hand slipped into my left, trembling. “All of the above.”
A lean man, balding, six feet tall, stood about that far to the left of
Shadowslinger. He was armed with another bone china cup. He had an upper-
crust attitude on, but his clothing was workaday. He would attract no attention
on the street.
Nearby, as though trying to take reassurance from that man’s presence
without becoming personally involved, was a woman of an age well beyond the
thirty-something she artfully strove to project. She was tall, thin to the verge of
emaciation, equally plainly dressed but from a high-end source. My first thought
was that her hair should be short and silver-gray instead of a grand profusion of
chestnut curls.
The final guest occupied a chair like Barate’s, a few feet from Algarda.
Unlike the others, he seemed comfortable.
A friend of the family.
I looked no closer because Shadowslinger had begun to respond to our
arrival.
The ugly old tub of goo was scary just sitting there, behind a massive oak
table a good four feet by eight. She would weigh in at three hundred pounds but
was only five feet three inches tall on those occasions when she actually stood.
She got around aboard a fleet of customized wheelchairs. Strafa said she hadn’t
been able to stand and support her own weight for more than minutes for as long
as she could remember. But Constance Algarda did not need to be a ballet diva.
She was Shadowslinger, one of the darkest and most powerful Karentine
sorcerers alive.
Rumor suggested that she never ate where she could be seen. I’d never seen
her touch a bite, yet she kept on getting bigger.
Shadowslinger’s vast, wide mouth expanded into what she meant as a smile.
She eyed me in a manner intended to be coquettish. My gorge rose. Gorge. Neat
word. You don’t get to deploy it very often.
My dearly beloved growled, “Grandmother, behave. Father, be merciful. Tell
us what’s going on. You’ve gotten poor Garrett out of bed six months before the
crack of noon. You know how hard that is on him.”
Barate would do the talking. His mother liked it that way. That made
everything creepier.
He sat up straight and slid to the edge of his chair. He extended his right
hand, palm upward, toward the lean, bald man. “Richt Hauser.”
“Rich?” I said. He looked more like a Ned or a Newt.
“Richt.” Hardening on the end consonant. “Hauser.” With an “s” as in house,
not as in hawser.
Strafa held my left arm with both hands. I was supposed to be impressed and
maybe intimidated.
Richt Hauser did not so much as nod. That told me a lot about who he
thought he was, which would be the most important man in the room.
Barate then indicated the woman. “Lady Tara Chayne Machtkess.”
Seemed I ought to know that name, at least the Machtkess part. She inclined
her head in response to my bow, smiling thinly beneath narrowed, calculating
eyes. I caught a whiff of something predatory. And, behind that, of something
that might be a frightened little girl.
Barate shifted hands. He indicated the man in the other easy chair. “Kyoga
Stornes. Often underfoot around here because he’s been my best friend since we
were kids. But this time he’s here because he has some skin in the game.”
I knew the name. There were family legends about the adolescent adventures
of Barate and Kyoga. At the moment Kyoga looked more like a victim than the
perpetrator of malicious mischief.
Karma being a bitch?
Shadowslinger stirred impatiently. “Yes, Mother. Garrett, we need your
expertise and resources.”
Remarkably polite. But these weren’t people I could tell to go away because
I didn’t feel like working. Which I would never have to do as long as I remained
hooked up with my wonder woman, Strafa.
“How so? In what way?”
Shadowslinger got some exercise by pointing at Hauser. Unhappily, Hauser
reported, “Signs of preliminaries for a Tournament of Swords have begun to
appear. We all have someone likely to be conscripted into the game.”
I had no idea what he was talking about. Neither did Strafa. She asked,
“What is a Tournament of Swords?”
Hauser’s instant response was irritation at being forced to explain. That
morphed into an appreciation of the fact that this tournament business was not
common knowledge even inside the highest levels of the sorcerer class. “Each
few generations an uncertain supernatural process or power arises and compels a
contest. .”
He stopped. Emotion had cracked his cool. He struggled to regain his
composure.
Barate took over. “What happens is, a bunch of talented people, usually kids,
get chosen to participate. Most come from families in the sorcery business. They
aren’t asked if they want in. They’re conscripted. They’re supposed to fight until
only one is left. That one wins the prize, which is a device containing all of the
power of the defeated contestants combined. Back when the tournament was
devised, the families wanted that so badly they all signed on. The final prize,
power, would make the winner a minor god.”