Just
a suggestion...you might want to download Georgia
and Verdana.
|
Just
a suggestion...you might want to download Georgia
and Verdana.
|
Chapter Three: The Deliverer
I am Kali the Destroyer, absolute Blackness, eater of worlds,
I am Kali the Divine Mother, outside of time,
The bringer of ends and beginnings,
I am Kali the Certain, enemy of Chaos, bringer of Light,
I am the Deliverer.
"What happened?" Sean screeched and hit the steering column of Kyle's old electric. "Damn!" he howled, easing up on the accelerator. 'Couver's icy byways were not treating the nearly-treadless tires to a particularly straight direction. "I nearly killed my own father, for God's sake!"
His passenger, the recently rescued Facet Molly, sat mouse-like in the passenger seat, entirely composed, despite the veers and jolts that Sean's ire meted out to the obstinate ice. Only her pale eyes betrayed her apprehension, and they seemed to be worried about something outside the little electric car that had served Rosenante to Sean's derring Don.
"How could it have happened?" Sean turned left too suddenly and the little car kept right on the same direction, only sideways, phummmp, into a filthy bank of drift and plow-track against the opposite curb. Whence proceeded an ear-splitting chorale of screeching and screaming and whining as Sean pressed the light vehicle to back up. A dog, five blocks over, started woofing and the youngest MacLeod finally gave it up and stepped out to survey the situation.
"Well?" Sean crossed his arms and stared at Molly.
"We seem to be stuck," she replied politely, but her eyes stared down the street towards some distant point that they hadn't left since Sean had offered to take her back to Joe's Bar. The other two rescuers had headed off in the antique T-bird, stopping by the Drieg, Thomas' bar, to help Grant, get some coffee, or whatever. The Drieg was most noted for its infinite variety of whatevers, or at least the equipment and staging for same.
"No," Sean braced into the drift and threw his weight against the car. "What happened?"
Molly reached in through the driver's window and disengaged the drive. "We seem to have slid into a drift on that last turn, Master Sean," she replied.
Sean kicked the bumper in disgust. "No, Molly," he repeated, "Tell me what happened."
"You're asking me?" Molly looked up from digging in the ice with the right rear hubcap.
"Yes, Molly." Sean watched what she was doing, digging little ridges in tidy succession behind the back of the right wheel. He levered off the left cap and began to do the same on his side.
"You want to know what I think?" Her tiny voice was clearly astonished.
"It's not so strange," Sean dug in his pockets and handed over his gloves. "You know everything, Molly. I see how you watch, how you work the 'puters till they scream, 'Yes, Master. More, Master!' "
Molly laughed so hard she dropped the chrome bowl and its ice shavings. "All right, Sean. I think it was because you appeared so suddenly and you neglected the address."
"Excuse me?"
"The address, Sean," she repeated. "Surely your father taught you the address."
It was clear from the look on Sean's face he wasn't following.
"The flourish," she tried again. "The salute?
"Oh, come on now," Molly continued. "Your father is famous for his. It's the one we get taught as Watchers. It means 'on your guard,' and for Watchers it means 'get the hell out of Dodge, now.' "
"What means--" Sean sputtered.
"I am Duncan MacLeod, of the Clan MacLeod," Molly said solemnly. "The address."
"Oh," Sean's breath rose out of him from some warm depth that made a cloud round his face before it floated up into the morning air. "I thought that was just his way--you mean I'm supposed to do that too?"
"You begin the engagement, the challenge, with an address," Molly explained, "so that when the battle blindness strikes, you will have identified whether the man before you is friend or foe."
"Oh." Another vaporous exhalation drifted up and away from his perplexity.
Molly made leather puppets out of Sean's enormous gloves and then bent back to carving out the ice behind the tires.
Sean likewise returned to their endeavor, but his mind was elsewhere, practicing. "Ho, there, you have met Prince Leod. Avast, I am Sean, the eldest MacLeod heir. I am the Immortal Prince, Sean MacLeod." All of these were rendered in tiny frost clouds of overweening pride and delight...
...and Molly's soundless laughter.
Anthony Jackson Stoner, former Federal Court Judge, District Three, Seacouver and environs, Stonewall to his friends, bellied up to the bar at Joe's. The bar was closed just now, but it's original owner, Seacouver's mayor, and the man for whom the place had been named, stood behind the bar, while the current owner, Dragon, and his minions bustled about, sprucing and tidying and setting up for the coming New Year's celebration.
"Well, set 'em up, Joe," Tony Stoner leaned onto the bartop over both his elbows, quoting a very old song.
Joe Dawson's attention drifted back to the greying jurist before him, away from the heart-pleasing vision of his lovely wife, First Lady Lucille, who floated effortlessly through Dragon's workforce, adjusting and admiring and admonishing. He had once again been struck by how Sweet Lucille always seemed simultaneously ethereal and earthy. She was lush and stern and marvelously funny all at once, entirely magical--not even taking into account she was the true power behind the political doings of 'Couver by the Bay.
Not even taking into account that she was Immortal, or the Facet version thereof, Joe had to admit Sweet was the most enticing woman on the planet, satisfying on every level. When he thought about how much he had loved Set, it made him hurt all over. When Joe thought about how much he loved Sweet, it just made him glad and warm and a little "hot and bothered below the belt buckle," as Luz would say.
Joe knew Stoner hadn't meant to remind him of Set just now. He knew that the line from the song was just inevitable, his name and his former occupation just called it forth, as it had invoked the line that first day he had met Ram. How many years? Sean was now twenty. The millennium was nearly as old. He hadn't stood behind this bar for almost that long. Still, looking across at Stoner, it seemed he had never left.
"What'll you have?" Joe used the standard bartender address, politely ignoring the fact that Tony had wandered into the bar sans wife. Anne was wonderful in her own ways, but she was no Lucille.
Stoner put the side of his right hand down on the bar and then hopped it sideways, saying only, "Shots," and counting out an even dozen.
Joe leaned down and retrieved a lesser whiskey--old habits die the hardest--set up the first three glasses and poured. He never measured. He could pour shots within a whisker. One of those things, he thought. Like riding a bike.
Stoner slid onto the barstool and picked up the first glass, throwing it back, like a cowboy just off the range in an old movie.
Joe just got the remaining nine glasses up when Stoner finished the third shot. The judge was serious about this, Joe thought, pouring faster.
After each single-gulp emptying, Stoner set the shotglass back in its place in the row. At the end of the row, Tony stopped, belched, looked up at Joe, and said, "Again."
Joe Dawson knew better than to explain about Facets' not getting drunk and how this was a waste of time and booze and energy. He was reminded of Lucille's answer to a question he'd asked about one of her former customers--before marrying the Mayor, Sweet had been what used to be referred to as a "working girl." Sweet maintained that the proper term was "courtesan." In any case, Joe had asked about a man who sought out Lucille's very special services and paid quite handsomely, even though he was so elderly and frail, he could not avail himself of any of her many splendors.
Lucille had just laughed. "It's like the line in 'Last Unicorn,' " she said. "About why the skeleton ghost wants wine when he can't drink it, or taste it, or experience it in any way. And the ghost says, 'Because I remember.' "
One more time through the twelve and Stoner was remembering so well that he nearly fell off the bar stool.
Two more times down the row and Joe heard himself saying, "Maybe you want to slow down a little there, buddy. Something you want to talk about? Anne giving you a hard time?"
Stoner paused with glass eleven halfway to his mouth. His pale eyes moved their gaze up with a daunting deliberation and fixed, like twin searchlights, on the Mayor of 'Couver.
Joe could see he'd struck a nerve. "You know, I love Anne, and I'd never say anything against her, but that woman--"
Glass number eleven, now empty, went whizzing by Joe's left ear and crashed into the mirror behind.
The room went still as death.
Joe recovered from his dodge just in time to take the full measure of glass number twelve all over his face and down his beard.
And before the shock wore off the room, Judge Stoner had stalked out of the court.
All rise.
Joe tucked his cane under his arm and rubbed his hands together. Not all bad, though, Joe mused. He'd been a sort of disheveled and old forty-nine-year-old twenty years ago, but now he made a smashing fine fox of sixty-nine years. So Sweets said, and so it was. He would be dead by now were it not for the dragon, and life was good.
They were all blinded by the snow dazzled light which beamed through the still-open door several silent seconds after the jurist's noisy, if wordless, departure. Joe waited what he assumed was the appropriate and respectful pass of time, then he set 'em up, on the house, and departed himself for the chill and solitude of the grubby little alleyway, the frost-burnished sign that still blinked his name.
No sign of Stoner. There would be no heartfelt apologies, no slap on the back to make it all dandy again. Oh, well, there would be time, God knew. Time and more time.
Which made Joe suddenly unsteady and nauseous. Two whole decades and he was still getting used to this immortality business. Most days he just blew it off, like so much dust, but, like the dreadful memories of the war which cost him his legs, it would come crashing down upon him, unexpectedly, like the Hand of God.
Was there such a thing as "pre-traumatic stress syndrome?"
For the moment, anyway. Joe was no one's fool. Soon he would have to retire as Seacouver's mayor. Soon after, they'd have to move, then pretend their death, then reinvent their lives all over again, strangers in a strange land. He wondered how the Immortals did this. He and Lucille hadn't even been through the first cycle of this pretense to mortality. They had yet to leave their friends and home, even one time. How many hundreds of times had MacLeod done so? How many thousands had Adam?
He should go and speak with Master Thomas. Perhaps they could stay at the compound north of the city until they could make more coherent plans. Not today. Not tomorrow. Sometime soon, though.
There would be time.
"Mayor Dawson?" a tiny voice sounded at his elbow.
"Molly!" Dawson balanced on his cane with his left arm and gathered her in with his right. "Oh, Molly, Molly!" He bowed his head onto the top of hers. "Are you all right?" he whispered, sniffing back the icy tears which had come as suddenly as God's Hand and Sad Time.
"Fine, I'm fine, Mr. Dawson," Molly reached up and stroked his silver beard, her face a mirror of his concern. "Are you?"
"Oh, yes. Now I am. We were so worried, Molly. What happened?"
"It's a little cold out here, Mr. Dawson," Molly drew back from him and nodded towards the steel front door by the sign. "If you buy me a drink, I'll tell you as much as I know."
Thomas Cross stopped, mid-swipe, in his bar cleaning and studied the Immortal, Duncan MacLeod. He did this surreptitiously, to be sure, but with every one of his finely-tuned senses. The Highlander was still fired with the last remnants of battle lust, or surely he would have noticed by now. Thomas was concerned about what would happen when the Lord MacLeod returned to earth and found things not as they had been before.
Across the empty stone tower of the Drieg bar, amid hazy curtains of stained glass rays, Duncan's partner--Thomas still could not quite think of him as the Scotsman's "spouse"--wandered languorous circles round the implacable Facet, Grant.
And the bray, brawny Scot watched every move the lanky Eldest Immortal made...
And still he did not notice the difference.
"More coffee?" Thomas offered, as much to break his own tension as to be a courteous host, though he was always this within the demesne of his rather eccentric barroom.
"What?" MacLeod glanced away from the central circle of the tower and towards the dark, diminutive Immortal who was "Master Xavier" to a distressingly large contingent of wealthy, and kinky, Seacouverians. "Ummm, no. I'm still working on this one. He killed me, you know?" This last was cast over the bar in much the same tones as a weather report.
"Adam?" Thomas breathed. Surely not.
"No," Duncan sighed softly, "My own son. Can you believe it?"
Thomas' temporal lobes clicked into overdrive reviewing all the Freud he'd ever read and then some. Oh, dear. How to proceed over this troublesome field of the id and all its pesky mines? "Sean?" Best to be certain before launching into the "all children kill their fathers in some way or another, just to attain manhood in their own eyes" speech.
"He beat me. It was a tricky field, but he beat me anyway," Duncan shook his snow melted mane and sucked back his coffee as if it were a jigger of gin, complete with the "ahhh" after the swallow. "Never even had a sword in his hand before now. Never stepped onto a single field of battle. Beat me like I was a crone. He beat me."
And that was why he hadn't noticed the difference yet.
"All just the same to you," Duncan mumbled a "Sweet Lucille", "I'd rather not talk about this anymore."
Which was fine with Thomas, who had said two words the entire thread. He knew the story would be forthcoming, if only because Adam never would pass up a chance to tease his mate unmercifully and this should make something in the nature of a Tale of Tales if Thomas' guess was right. They always were.
"Hey," Duncan leaned over the bar and jostled Horsemaster Thomas who was still busy readying the bar for New Year's Eve, the largest party they held all year at the Drieg Tower. Thomas was thinking of coming as a black demon, perhaps a shade redundant, but in honor of Ram and just by way of being a little disrespectful of Duncan's banishment of the dragon, without actually disregarding the edict.
"Yes?" Thomas looked up from the last of the polished crystalware.
"What IS he doing?" Duncan's square jaw angled toward the two men, the only others in the Drieg at this all-too-sunny time of the day.
Thomas lifted up just enough to peek over the bar. "I'd say Grant is giving Dr. Piersen a tour of the Drieg. He's never been here before. Thomas bent down to stow the glassware out of harm's way. The really good glasses were always locked away on New Year's. Things tended to get out of hand, no matter the care Thomas took to keep his clientele in check.
"Get up here," Duncan tapped on the broad back of the Drieg Master. "What IS that?"
Thomas wiped his hands and stood up straight, peering across the large central well.
The Drieg was laid out like a circular ambulatory. Off the central well, great stone archways led to smaller rooms around the entire circle, out of the glare of the main round floor, now lit by the almost-noon sun and the stunning stained glass rose window which topped the five story tower. Grant had been leading Adam around the circle, evidently explaining this or that unusual fitting, showing off the great tub in the fifth room, peeking into the enormous Drieg kitchen beyond the panels at the far wall, so forth. But now, the gigantic Drieg manager was mincing across the center floor stones toward the round dais which stood, two steps up, at the exact center of the Drieg. Grant was definitely not the type to mince, either by stature or nature.
Thomas stifled his laughter in his palm. "I know what he's doing." He took a deep breath. "Not the same without the music."
"What's not the same?" Duncan growled. "What music?"
Thomas stepped back from the bar and started, "Dah, dummm, dadum, chink. Dadum, dahdumm, chink." With each "chink" he shimmied his shoulders in a jolting shiver, all the while stepping forward in time to the "dadums."
Duncan's mouth dropped open. "I'm so sure I don't want to know about this."
Thomas cut the demo short. "Grant is recounting the last time--" Thomas swallowed his tongue. "It's just a dance," he wasn't usually so bad at covering.
"And THAT would be?" the Highlander pointed towards the dais.
Grant had ascended the dais and was crouching down, grimacing and showing his teeth, with his hands forming enormous claws.
"It's a Ram thing, isn't it?" Duncan snorted.
"Oh, Lord," Thomas beseeched, "It was the day he was made Immortal, Lord. He doesn't mean anything by it! Grant would never be disrespectful, Lord. He'd rather die first!"
"Tell him to stop it," Duncan said with a deceptive placidity.
"But, see, he already has," Thomas indicated the two men, strolling off towards the hot tub room, Adam stripping off his sweater, the navy bridge coat already draped over Grant's tree-size forearm.
"He can stop that too, while he's at it," Duncan's dark lids lowered.
Thomas tried to breathe more slowly. Here it comes, he thought. "Stop what, Lord?"
Duncan stood up and loomed over the bar and its tiny tender. "I don't know what your arrangement with Grant is, but WE are monogamous."
It was not a word usually spoken at the Drieg, except in the negative, so it took Thomas a moment to reorient. "Oh, I'm sure he's just being courteous, Lord."
"Well, just so---," Duncan began, but mid-thought, he halted and all the breath rushed out of him in a sorry, sucking wind. He tottered to his feet, where he found, not his balance, but the cold stones, slapping up against him on his way to oblivion.
Thomas called for Grant and Adam and vaulted the bar as if it were a horse. From his knees beside the Scot, Thomas looked up at the slim Immortal with the prodigious beak.
"I think he knows," Thomas said. "He felt the jealousy first and then the separation."
Adam just shrugged. "It wasn't as if I could keep it from him forever. I can't survive that close to him," he explained to no one but the dusty air. "I just couldn't stand it any more. He couldn't either, but he'd rather die than admit it, so I took measures...I stepped away," Adam cast about for a better explanation. "The same way you go 'silent'," he said finally to Thomas.
"One hundred hours," Grant intoned as he bent down to pick up the insensate Scot.
Adam just stared. He didn't rush after. If not Sanctuary, then Grant's arms were the closest thing to it. "Hundred hours?"
Thomas thought a moment. "He means that is the sum total of how long you can be only one."
Adam slumped a little, unconsciously compromising their disparity in height. He let the thought echo away from him, dashing itself out against the silent stones.
"A little sad, really," Thomas remarked.
"Seemed longer," Adam murmured.
Ram drove the crown of her head backwards into the unyielding steel of the tilted table. She had just emerged from a relatively bad turn in the stoning pit and was in no fit mood to find the ex-Interpol agent still at it with his probes and shocks and tiny little scalpels. She had enough trouble keeping Hell and Earth separate. She didn't need this aggravation.
And Connor! Sheesh! A worse mistake she'd not made in the recent past--discounting the Danaan extinction of course. He'd found Hell after all his pesky searching past the protections she had laid down for his best interests, to keep him safe from it. He'd finally gotten tired of boffing Set all the time and gone squirreling around where any decent mortal might fear to tread. If ever a soul was born to play in Hell it was he. Dreadful gaelic distaff!
Well, it wasn't HIS Hell after all, as it had turned out, though he was beside himself with glee to be its newest ringmaster.
And, oh, brother, did he have ideas about how best to take up his managerial position, now there was no one left to do so except Ram herself.
Odd. She had thought Hell could be no worse than the one she had made.
If Ram never heard that incipient little "hey,hey,heh," MacLeod chortle again, it might still be Hell, but it would feel like Heaven.
At least Connor had a purpose. The Scot wanted her to be so sick of him that Ram would find a way to set him free, to send him to Last Gate, once and for all. She had told him a few clever methods he might try, but he hadn't believed her for a minute. Pity. It had become a sort of a game with the two of them. No mortal would have seen it as anything but the most horrible and vindictive torture and torment, but there was a sort of childishness about it as well, a dreadful humor of sorts. They had even come to have pet names for one another. He called her "little lizard," and she called him--well, that wasn't really pertinent to her current straits.
This one, this Nick person, had no goal at all. Well, not exactly true. His goal was to seek so diligently, so thoroughly, that he would never, never find. On purpose, he ran away from his grail by pursuing it to death.
"Why do you waste your time so?" Ram asked aloud.
Nicolae drew back suddenly and hissed. "You are awake then?"
"I would not have thought you were this much of a coward, Nick." She had tried imperious, placating, threatening, and pedantic. Why not give friendly a try?
"What do you mean?" he wiped his brow and leaned against the slanted table.
Ram tried to overlook her ruined arm and sited on him directly. He was exhausted. Grey-faced and sweating like one of Lucille's proverbial pigs. She must have given him quite a go while her brains were off playing "break that bone" with Connor in Hell.
"I'm sorry your father died," Ram said softly. "I am sorry he was not there to teach you all the things you needed to know as an Immortal. You have such an exquisite sense of duty and precision and honor--" None of which was true anymore, but she was trying to speak to the man whose progress she had followed in the times before his First Death rendered him so frantic and directionless. "I am sorry you are more, and less, than you thought you were. I'm sorry that first Quickening frightened you so, and I am sorry that the man you killed trying to see if his spinal cord would regenerate was THAT particular Immortal. You do know he was insane?"
"Shut up!" Nicolae screeched.
"I am so sorry it has taken this long to find you, to bring you to the people who could make your life bearable and even wonderful, Nick."
"Shut up!!!" he screamed more loudly.
"The Immortals are good people, Nick. They aren't monsters. You aren't a monster--. You are--"
Ram never got to finish. Ex-Detective Breslaw picked up the nearest sharp object and drove it into the woman's left eye where it stuck in the bone of the socket at the back.
She did not react at first, and when she did, Nicolae thought she'd gone mad finally from all the pain.
"God Damn It, Molly! I am going to be so not happy about this!" Ram bellowed. Then she turned her head towards Nicolae, siting on him with the grisly scalpel handle and the cold remaining eye.
"I take it all back, Breslaw," Ram said evenly. "I am not sorry for you. Not one little bit."
"Comes now my son," she added, "to end your pathetic little quest for nothing."
Facet Molly looked up suddenly from her cocoa-with-double-white-goop-on-the-top. Her round eyes got more so, as if that were possible and she stopped in the middle of her story, staring due east, towards the bay. "Did you hear something?"
Everyone in Joe's bar looked the same direction, roughly the door where the old nursery had been, twenty years earlier, and some deli or other, before that.
"No, Honey," the lovely 'Couver First Lady, Lucille Dawson, answered for them. "Go on with your story. Ram rescued you and sent you across town for your second rescue, down the street from Uncle Tom's bar."
Joe winced. The Couver mayor--temporarily reverted to barkeep for this occasion--was just waiting for Lucille to call the Drieg Tower that in the vicinity of its owner, Thomas Cross. He knew there'd be a fight, but his money was still on Sweet Lucille.
Molly took a sip, warming her tiny hands around the old-fashioned mug--a trademark of the bar. When she was settled again, she launched into her version of "Larry, Curly, and Methos Rescue the Fair Maiden from Yon Tower."
By the time she was done, they were howling hysterically, even Hello Allen, whom everyone now called "Doc," emerged from Dragon's office--and his try at a quick nap on the sofa-- to join in their mirth. Even Margaret, who had been so unnerved by Molly's kidnapping, finally accepted the fact that the dear Facet was returned to her, hale and whole and still, in her quiet way, funny as a crutch.
Striker, who had been sent down from the Estates by Dragon when the barn chores were done, had arrived to help with the search not fifteen minutes after said search was rendered unnecessary by Molly's arrival. He'd missed the row with Judge Stoner, but this more than made up for it.
Joe, more or less unconsciously, counted the house: Grant and Thomas, Mac and Adam, all at the Drieg Tower thawing out after their adventure, Molly and Margaret, Striker and Doc, himself and Lucille, here, Dragon tending the Estates, along with Kyle who'd remained to see to anything Mary might need. Yes, the family had come through Christmas more or less unscathed. If not all present, then certainly accounted for. Or so he thought.
The door slammed open, spilling the chill air and bright light over the kinder tones of the bar and the laughing stopped.
"I'm sure he's all right, Duncan," Adam's voice sounded through the glare while everyone suppressed the urge to shout, "Close the door!"
They were all too busy trying not to look guilty for breaking the edict about Ram being dead to them, or unborn, or whatever.
Joe checked the coffee, poured it into the warmer and started a new batch. Lucille went to greet the two men at the door, pulling them inside and shutting it herself. "Well, well," she warbled, taking their coats and dodging whatever was going on between them.
"Is Sean here?" Duncan was clearly worried.
Molly sank down in her seat and hid behind her cocoa.
Adam wandered over to the bar, took the coffee Joe offered him and simply waited for Joe to fill them in, while Duncan paced nervously at the door, despite Lucille's best "smoothing of feathers" maneuvers.
"We were just hearing how it went with the three of you across the bay there. Stirring tale that," Joe smiled.
Adam grinned. "Not our finest hour," he commented. "You better tell him where Sean is before he detonates," Adam indicated the two yards' worth of anxious Scottish father, even now making a march on Molly's table.
"Well, he left Molly off here over an hour ago," Joe shrugged. "I assumed he went over to the dojo to clean up. You know, mend that unfortunate hole that seems to have developed in his best sweater."
"Moths," Adam said.
"Right," Joe poured himself a coffee, and another for Mac. "Buddy, you look like you could use some of Doctor Joe's all purpose after battle brew," he called over to the Scot, still advancing on the trembling little Facet. "Hey, Barkeep to Highlander. Got cher hot, hot coffee right here."
"The Loft was empty and no sign Sean had been there since earlier this morning," Adam commented.
"Molly's not going to be able to speak if he doesn't gentle it down a bit," Joe appealed to the clanchief's consort.
"Warmeat!" Adam called out.
Duncan turned slowly toward the offending hail. "What?"
"Coffee, Duncan," Adam said cheerily. "Joe knows where Sean is."
Joe stared at the Eldest Immortal. "Oh, thanks a lot, Buddy."
Duncan MacLeod, usually gentle and gracious, was quite another fish kettle so close to battle, before or after. His intensity was daunting to say the least. Joe braced himself against the backbar.
"Well?" Duncan's thick brows lifted at their lateral margins.
"Adam may have misunderstood," Joe began.
"No he didn't," Adam piped up.
Both men stared at the Eldest Immortal.
"The question should be, 'Where is Ram?' " Adam countered.
"I told you never to--," Duncan's voice had developed a very disconcerting lower-register rumble.
"Oh, give it a rest, Dunc. We've really had enough of that."
Everyone stared at the Eldest Immortal.
"She killed my father!" Duncan rasped.
"And if the sword hadn't broken, I'd be standing there saying the same thing." Adam stood up his full length and plopped his fists on his hips. "Well, except that she isn't my father, and except that she cannot really die. But essentially the same thing. Would you have banished Connor then?"
"No, of course not! What a ridiculous thing to say, Old Man!"
"My thoughts exactly," Adam mused. "Like I said. It was cute when you did it, but it's getting old. So--what does Sean always say?--ah, yes, so fifteen minutes ago. Which leads us back to: Where is Ram, Joe?"
"Oh, come on," Joe whined. "I don't know. Ask Molly. She saw her last."
So much for chivalric intervention.
"Oh, no, Joe," Adam pursued his original question. "You're the one with the drakedar, or is that Ramdar?"
Duncan walked over to Molly's chair and crouched down so he was nearly kneeling on the old grey and white tiles. "What does Joe mean, you saw her last? It's okay, Molly," he hastened to add. "The banishment is null, over, done."
Molly took her first deep breath since the two Immortals had entered the bar. "She rescued me from that Immortal who was tracking you and broke into your cabin on the island when I was staying there, and brought me back--" she hesitated. "here," she finished uncertainly. "To 'Couver," she added.
Duncan waited for the words to mean something.
Adam started laughing.
Joe's pale eyes searched the bar as if he were looking through its dark brick walls. His gaze settled eastward, where Molly had thought she heard a sound.
Duncan patted Molly gently on her forearm. "Where, Molly?"
"Oh, no, Lord," Molly squeaked. "She made me promise. She'll kill me. She'll do worse than that. I didn't really tell Sean. I swear. It's just--I looked. We drove past the building on the way here. I couldn't help it. I looked." Molly went up an octave every other sentence. Neighborhood dogs would soon be barking at this rate. "Oh, she looked so awful. She stayed behind so they wouldn't come after me. They shot her and dragged her back in. I'm so worried."
Duncan tried to comfort her, but Margaret pushed him out of the way and held the sobbing Facet in a maternal hug. The Highlander knew well enough to retreat.
"So the whole thing was a sham to give Sean a chance to practice bravery," Adam started laughing again.
"Only now he's going after Ram, and it won't be practice," Duncan warned. "Well?" It seemed he was back to the question that had started this round.
Joe breathed out softly and chewed his lip. "There," he said, pointing towards the wharf. "That stupid shrimp hatchery project they couldn't get off the ground because the bay's too polluted. The bunker-looking grey concrete monstrosity at the end of Water Street."
Duncan dashed out the door.
Adam reached over the bar and poured himself another coffee.
Lucille reached her lovely hand over the bar and grabbed Joe's nearest ear. "And why have you never said anything about this 'Ram radar' thing, Honey?"
The door slammed back open. "Well, come on then," Duncan called to the Eldest Immortal.
"Sorry, Joe," Adam apologized half-heartedly, "this fight's all yours. Gotta go."
If Duncan had thought the fish cannery smelt bad, it was roses compared with this. Dragons might den here it so reeked of sulfur and smoke and old dead crustaceans.
"Duncan?" Adam's voice--too controlled, too sober--sounded out of the darkness far down the hall.
The Highlander unsheathed his new sword, setting his teeth against the "memory pain" of the near gutting to which his son had treated him earlier in the day. He advanced cautiously round the next bend which opened onto a metal ledge, the landing for a large steel stair leading downward into an even darker darkness.
Adam was there on the landing crouched over two corpses.
"Neither of them is Sean," Adam was quick to elaborate, "but this--." His pale palm brushed the rusted bannister and a cobweb of brilliant blue plasma and sparks lifted from the rail towards his hand. "--might be."
They were standing in the aftermath of a Quickening Major! Duncan braced himself. "Sean beat me, Adam. It's not likely this other Immortal was the victor."
Adam tried to smile in agreement, but he couldn't help the five millennia of home-grown cynicism which was his signature. "If he played fair--no."
"Come on," Duncan leaped the rail and went plunging down into the darkness.
Adam waited for a thud, to guage the distance. There was none.
"Well, come on," Duncan called out again. One floor down.
But of course, Adam smacked his forehead. I mean, how deep can you go next to a bay, anyway. Adam leapt after the Scot and they proceeded across what would have been the shrimp tank, and was now--Well they would surely know soon enough.
"I think there's someone there," Duncan put his broad forearm out across Adam's chest to halt him while he listened. "Yes," he pointed with the Claymore, its bright blade just visible in the meager light.
Adam listened a moment and then he dashed across the concrete tank and disappeared beyond a low metal door, set to glowing with his touch.
Duncan would not have thought he could hesitate in such a situation. His son might be wounded, or worse. But he stalled in the dusky, slimy heart of this dead place and waited, all unknowingly, for Adam to tell him it was safe.
Nor did he fully realized he was doing so until a cheery, "Sean's okay, Duncan," rang out from the eerily glowing jamb of the rivetted door.
Then his feet flew the distance and he found himself in another, smaller cell of dust and shadows. "Where are you?"
"I think there's a switch near the door," Adam offered. "Now that the Quickening has subsided, it might work."
It did.
Duncan's eyes were blinded suddenly and it was a moment before they cleared and he beheld a scene worthy of Dante's Seventh Ring, the place he imagined he had gone after the rape of Sean's mother. And all of that in the time before he knew what Hell was really like.
"Sweet Bridgette and all the Saints!" Duncan heard his dear mother, Mary's, favorite exclamation coming from his own lips. "Sean?" The Highlander called his son's name, but the grey eyes gazed out on nothing--a particularly awful nothing by their look--and the boy did not acknowledge his presence at all.
"Here," Adam loosened his grip on the boy and moved aside so Duncan could get closer to him. "You hold him and I'll take a look around and see if I can figure out what happened."
"Sean," the Highlander shook his son gently. "What happened here?"
Adam's fingers curled around Duncan's right shoulder and squeezed. "He's a little shocky now. Don't--. Just don't." The Elder Immortal smiled and nodded. "He'll be all right," he added, reassuringly. "Just not this minute, okay?"
The Highlander nodded his assent and drew Sean up onto his lap. The katana rattled softly. Sean had been lying on it. He must have fallen after the Quickening. Always a hard thing to keep standing through the maelstrom. Duncan still found it difficult.
"Ah, yes, what have we here," Adam sounded pleased with himself.
Duncan looked up. "Oh, Adam!" he said with as much disapproval as he could muster. "Put that down."
"Let's see. You DO look familiar," Adam kept right on talking to the head, like a demented version of Hamlet. "You know--," Adam turned the head to look straight at Duncan. "Do you know him?"
"Adam!"
But, yes, he did know him. Must have been one of those Immortals that has no signature pre-aura prior to their First Death. It was the Interpol Detective, Breslaw. "The one who went after Ingid," Duncan said aloud.
"Nicolae, of course," Adam rearranged his long hands onto either cheek of the head and peered into the dim, dead eyes. "Oh, Nicolae, you bad, bad boy." Then he simply dropped the thing on top of its corpse and continued his observations of the burned and bloody little lab, originally constructed for hatchery testing, salinity, nutrients, etc., now used for God Only Knew what. Well, God and Adam, given a little time and his very fine brain.
By the time he had sorted through the rubble on the various counters and returned to investigate the centerpiece of the room, Sean had begun to rouse. Sean's eyes were blinking and he had begun to moan incoherently, but it was an improvement, nonetheless. Adam reached towards the metal table, a shallow trough, tipped now at a thirty degree angle, chains and leather restraints still hanging from the higher edge and a reciprocal pair crumpled on the floor beneath the lower edge. In between was a rusty expanse of mostly-clotted blood stain, pooled at the bottom lip and spilling onto the floor. Adam reached out, touched the blood and brought it back to his sensitive nose.
"Adam!" Duncan called in disgust.
Which only made the Eldest Immortal plop the bloody finger into his mouth.
Whereupon the Scot gagged.
"Mmmm, mmm," Adam smiled. "Mom."
Sean's eyes widened in terror. "She killed him!" he said the words with a ringing clarity, if not coherence.
"It's over, Sean. It's okay," Duncan held fast as his son began to struggle.
"I--I couldn't do it. Those guys on the stairs. I didn't want to kill them. I couldn't help it. Then, then--," Sean dissolved in a storm of sobs and gulps.
"Later, Sean," Duncan rocked him slowly on his lap. "Let's get you out of here."
"No," Sean pushed away from his father and planted his back against the grimy wall, staring at the table. "She told me to take his head. In my mind--," he added, slapping his temple. "She told me and she told me, but I couldn't move."
Sean shook his head slowly and his gaze shot back to the table again. "I don't know. He, he crucified her on that, that metal slab. Sort of--I don't know. I thought, I saw--." He shook his head again. "Her arm, it was like, like--. It was all carved up and laid out like a red lace wing. He'd jabbed something in her eye. It was so awful, I couldn't move. I couldn't breathe. She kept saying over and over that it was all right, but, God--!"
Sean paused and gulped in the stinking air as if he'd run a long way, and had longer still to go.
Duncan stared up at Adam, but the Elder Immortal just closed his eyes and shook his head. He was right, the Highlander thought, best to let Sean go through this in his own way.
"He turned towards the cabinet over there," Sean's arm drifted up, but his finger wouldn't point. "A gun. I could see it when he turned around, but I still couldn't move. Then she, she--" Sean kept saying "she," but it escalated into a howling mantra of horror and lost all meaning in the verbal sense.
"We need to take him out of here," Duncan hissed over at Adam who was pawing through the carcass, looking for the gun. "Adam!"
"Let him finish, Duncan," Adam said without even looking up. "Believe me. I know the consequences of running from such moments. This way it won't be back to haunt him all his life."
"You're pretty smart for an old guy, Dahm," Sean remarked, much to both their surprise. "I'm all right. I guess. Did you know that Ram could do that?"
Adam wiped off his fingerprints, dropped the gun back down, and came over to kneel in front of his baby brother. "Do what, Sean?"
"Just, just--," Sean fought for composure, "think somebody dead?"
"Come again?" Adam asked.
Duncan felt a sudden electric charge run up the length of his spine and circle at his temples. Nothing at all like a Quickening.
"I can't say it any other way," Sean whined. "I could feel her getting angry--she must have been so tired--I didn't actually hear her, I only felt--well, it was like she said, 'enough of this already!' Something like that. And the man fell dead on the floor. The gun went off when he fell. She asked me to take his head, but, but--then I really couldn't move. Oh, God, I was so scared! I thought she was going to kill me next. I saw, I saw--just for an instant--how she feels about us, how she sees us. I think more of the mice in Thomas' barn than she does of us. We could mean nothing to her. We are so small and so stupid. So blind." Sean's fair face greyed and slacked. "I don't see why she even bothers with us at all. She just walked me over to the body and made me take his head. Then there was the Quickening and then--Oh, Poppa, how do you stand it?"
Duncan took this as his cue to gather his son up in his arms, as he had done when the boy was a child and had gone far past his bedtime in some adventurous romp or another. He strode from the room, Adam on his heels.
"Should we look for Ram?" Duncan asked idly, halfway up the steelmesh stairs.
"You ask that as if you thought I cared," Adam answered. "Not really," he added.
"All this time," the Scot's breath whistled out across the dank, empty tomb. Empty except for ex-detective, ex-Nicolae, ex-Breslaw. "Shouldn't we call the cleanup crew to take care of this."
"Already did," Adam patted the com in his left inside pocket, where his sword should have been, but it was the holidays, right, and anyway, he hated the new sword too much to just be dragging it around everywhere. "You started to say something else?"
"Oh," Duncan traversed the landing and headed into the hall. "All this time," he began again when the train of his thinking returned, "she could have killed anyone of us, instantly. Jesus!"
"It surprises you she's omnipotent?" Adam jibed.
"What? You mean with such a glorious son as yourself, Adam?"
"That's pretty funny," Adam laughed, "Yeah, pretty damn funny."
"Omnipotent," Duncan put his mouth around the word, if not his mind.
"For all the good it does her," Adam snorted. "Anyway, that should make you just about the happiest camper in all of the Northwest Territories."
"What do you mean?" Duncan paused at the end of the hall while Adam worked the door.
"You know sometimes I think you don't still have the brains God gave you, Dear," Adam helped the Scot settle his sleeping son in the back seat of Joe's car, which they'd commissioned to come on this rescue.
They shook off the winter chill and bundled into the front seat, Adam driving.
"Adam?"
"Yes, Beloved Spouse of Mine?"
"Tell me, please," Duncan was not in the mood for playing just now. If they were still One, then he wouldn't even have to be asking this question. He would already know everything Adam knew. He missed that. Immensely.
Adam took pity. "Well, for one thing, Duncan, My Love, it means that despite all our various aggravations and transgressions, Ram must truly love us, one and all."
"Huh?"
"Because we are all still very much alive," Adam explained. "Some of us long beyond our appointed years. The Facets are a superb example, and that tribe in Nairobi that Grace and Cassandra--well you get the idea."
"And that makes me the happiest camper?"
"Not to be too specific--" Adam paused and indicated the back seat passenger.
"Don't worry," Duncan said. "He's dead to the world. Probably won't wake up until after New Years."
"All righty, then. If one is omnipotent, if one can kill, like a basilisk, with a single glance---" he paused again, this time for effect.
"Yesss?" Duncan spit through the tight clench of his teeth.
"Well, then, that is one person who can never be raped," Adam finished.
"Oh?" Duncan's bushy brows lifted. "Oooooh. Of course, you're right. I never raped her. Oh, Adam! What a relief!"
Which relief lasted all of about two seconds, at which point a voice from the back seat asked,
"Pops? Don't you think it's about time we talked about you and Mom and how I got started?"
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