Sasharia En Garde (6 page)

Devlaen sighed. Zathdar returned his attention to the path,
which switchbacked down the side of a grassy slope into a forest-covered little
vale. Elva, who seemed the least interested in questions of magic, was digging
through her pack, and emerged triumphantly, holding a roundish shape wrapped in
a length of clean linen.

“Bread. Anyone hungry?”

“Yes,” I exclaimed as my guts growled a hallelujah chorus.

Elva split the bread into four equal portions, passed it
down the row, and we ate as we rode.

Sun Zhavalieshin crossed the continent of North America,
landing with the rest of the red-eye passengers in LAX on a hazy morning.

She’d had plenty of time to plan out her strategy, since she
couldn’t sleep. First, a cab. Second, the small mailbox place she and Sasha had
agreed on years before, a couple miles from the airport. Nothing much changed
in Westchester, along Sepulveda. The constant roar of planes overhead kept the
area from becoming too hip and thus redesigned every couple of years, unlike
some of the other communities so close to the beaches.

The mailbox place was still there. Sun asked the cabbie to
wait, got out in her rumpled suit, and ran inside. Her fingers shook as she
rattled the lock. She wrenched it open and sorted through the accumulation of
trash mail and ads. There, behind her own postcard with the Omni Hotel info,
was a postcard with Sasha’s latest work and apartment addresses, dated two
weeks before. They had faithfully mailed their changes each time they moved,
just as promised, in case their cell phones broke, in case email didn’t work . . .
They knew it really meant that in case one of them vanished without a trace,
there’d always be a starting place for a search.

She gave the cabbie Sasha’s apartment address and sat back,
eyes closed. The meter was ticking up ridiculously, but she didn’t care. Either
she would soon go out of the country or out of the world. Whichever it turned
out to be, she had to use up these dollars.

The new apartment was in Venice. With the meter still
ticking, she climbed out, immediately spotting Sasha’s old rattletrap of a car.
Sun paused on the doorstep long enough to straighten her linen suit and touch a
hand to her hair, upswept as always. She knocked.

No answer, but she could hear the thump-thump-thump of a
stereo inside. So she rapped with the metal clasp of her purse, and this time
the door was opened by a tall, pretty-faced young man with a carefully tended
three-day stubble. His leer turned to confusion when he looked up from Sun’s
bosom to her raised eyebrows. “Yah?”

“I am Sasha’s mother. Is she here?”

Dougie wavered. His first instinct was to slam the door, but
then he thought the woman might call the cops, and the place reeked of weed.

The woman cleared her throat. Dougie’s single remaining
brain cell fumbled its way back to the present. “Naw. But you can look around
if you want.” He opened the door, pointed toward Sasha’s bedroom, and cranked
up his death metal so she wouldn’t grill him with stupid questions.

She marched inside the room and Dougie forgot her as he lit
up another joint.

Sun shut the door against the noise and marijuana smoke, and
looked around. Absolutely nothing recognizable except that silly water bed. Sun
opened the closet, where a few clothes hung.

Below the clothes, two pairs of shoes sat side by side.
Otherwise the closet was empty—no gear bag.

No gear bag.

Sasha never went anywhere without that bag.

Sun spotted Sasha’s car keys lying on the bare desktop. She
grabbed them up, drew in a deep breath, and opened the door. The noise almost
blasted her back inside, but she hustled to the front door, glad the lout
seemed as determined to ignore her as she wanted to ignore him. There was no
use in asking him anything. She wouldn’t trust whatever he said.

She stepped out, closed the door, and breathed again.

After she paid off the waiting cabbie, she got into Sasha’s
car. First, a search. No gear bag. The car smelled of Sasha’s favorite herbal
shampoo, a scent that made Sun’s eyes tear, but she had to keep moving.

All right. Wherever Sasha was, she’d managed to take her
gear bag with her.

So it was time to follow.

Sun drove the car to the long-term storage facility in West
L.A. that she hadn’t opened in years. She’d driven by once or twice, always meaning
to get rid of the past and start over. But she’d never made it inside.

Now was different. Math was no longer the issue. Sasha was.
Sun parked Sasha’s car in the last slot and walked inside, her heart thumping
an anxious drum roll.

From the thin chain she wore around her neck, she took the
key she’d carried for all these long years, and found the storage locker. It
wasn’t very big.

Nobody else was in the place, not in the middle of a working
day. She crouched down, glad she’d kept herself in shape, and opened the lock.
There lay the outfit she was wearing the day they blasted through the Gate back
to Los Angeles.

She took it out and buried her face in the soft, hand-woven
cotton-linen from another world. It smelled a little musty, but faint, oh-so
faint, remained a trace of the queensblossom rinse she’d always loved to use on
her hair, and even fainter, a trace of Math’s musky, male sweat, left from that
last desperate clinging hug and kiss.

A zap of pain tightened her jaw, but two deep breaths and
she had control again. Sasha had vanished, maybe against her will. The longer
Sun messed around, the longer her search might be, for who knew what time was
doing between here and there?

She looked in either direction. No one. So she stripped out
of her middle-aged lady suit and pulled on the old clothes. Their softness and
scent were nearly as powerful as magic in sending her emotionally back to her
confused younger self, who stumbled through the World Gate into Los Angeles
with a grieving child at her side, no money, nowhere to go except home—decades
in Earth time after she’d left.

“Mom,” Sun whispered, leaning her forehead against the cold
metal of a locker.

Her mother had taken them in, though she was old. And trenchantly
conservative. You don’t change women of eighty, you upset them. Sun thought of
her mother’s wrenching hands, her angry tears, during their last fight—over her
giving Sasha fencing and martial arts lessons.
She needs to be a lady, not a boy-girl, or she’ll turn out like you!
At least Sasha had known her grandmother for a year, long enough for Sun to get
on her feet and find work, before Gramma slipped away after a massive stroke,
leaving them on their own yet again.

Time to go.

So. A quick look down. The shirt was roomy and long, the
riding trousers voluminous. She tied an old, faded sash, belonging to Math,
around her middle, then sat on the dusty floor and pulled off her sensible
pumps. There was no leather where she was going. And no one had ever seen nylon
stockings.

Her old cotton-wool socks fit over her feet, and then the
soft greenweave mocs, cotton-lined inside, nubbly outside where the waxy leddas
strips were woven. She stood and bounced lightly on her toes, loving the feel.
The shoes were flexible, yet gripped the ground. A person could fight in those
shoes. Or run. Or sit comfortably through a rainy night listening to ancient
ballads—

She shook away the memory and bent down, her first instinct
to bundle all her American clothes into the locker. That would not do. Who knew
when she’d be back, and under what circumstances? Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never.
If so, in twenty-five years (for she was paid up that long) whoever emptied it
out would find things tidy.

She pulled out the last item, a short knife her husband had
given her. She hadn’t brought her sword. It would have gotten her arrested in
seconds. But the knife she could tie on under her trouser leg.

When she was done she straightened up and opened her purse.
Nothing in there was needed except one item, which she slid out and held tightly
as she put the purse, with all her money and papers, into the locker. Shut it.
Locked it.

And without allowing herself time to worry, she spoke the
words she’d never thought to speak, stared down at the gleaming gold transfer
talisman in her hand—

Magic ripped her apart and reassembled her on the other side
of the World Gate, with all the sensitivity of a giant swatting a gnat.

She landed painfully on her knees and bowed her swimming
head. Yoga breathing, in, hold, out, hold. In, hold, out, hold . . .
When her stomach settled, she performed some cautious yoga stretches. Very slow
stretches, for fifty-year-old hips and ankles aren’t as forgiving about sudden
jars as twenty-year-old ones.

Gradually sound and sense returned. She picked up the
transfer talisman that had fallen from her fingers and tucked it into the deep
pocket in her trousers, then looked around the tower Destination chamber,
apparently unchanged all these years, except by wind and weather blowing
through the narrow arrow slits.

She stepped cautiously into the ancient dining room, and
there were all those age-darkened tapestries hanging on the walls, as she
remembered. Let’s see, the old shortcut—hardly a secret passage, as everyone
had used it—lay behind the middle tapestry. On the opposite side of the room,
the big carved doors led to the grand stairway, and the great hall below.

Where she heard voices.

She paused. Male voices, exasperatingly blurred by the lousy
acoustics of stone. She scanned. The dust and spider webs in the corners
indicated that no one had been around for years. Yet here and there the dust
had been disturbed. One of the old tables lay on its side, and the other had
been shoved into a corner, its top mostly dust free.

So who’d been here? Sasha? No female voices—

As the speakers became more distinct, she realized two
things. One, they were coming up the grand stairway, and two, she recognized
Canary’s voice.

Was it really Canardan Merindar? She shook her head. No, she
would not mistake that charming baritone voice, the musical laughter. And they
were coming
straight here
.

She tiptoed to the middle tapestry and slipped behind it,
poised to run.

Moments later the voices abruptly resolved into audible
clarity, meaning the speakers had entered the room through the main door.

“. . . they had that door locked. Signs
they’d been in here. But by the time my men got the door opened, they were
gone.”

“There’s supposed to be another entrance,” Canary said.
“Probably behind one of these rotting rugs. Leave it for now. Where is the
Destination chamber? Ah.”

The voices diminished slightly as the two passed into the
tower, but Sun heard Canary say, “There’s still a strong sense of magic in
here. I don’t know enough about transfer magic to gauge how long it would
linger. There’s nothing else here. All right.”

The voices got louder. “Tell me again about the fight in the
court. Samdan said it was two men who’d joined those Eban brats.”

Eban brats! So Steward
Eban, or at least her children, are involved
, Sun thought.
She was Math’s most loyal—

Listen!

“. . . the pirate or the other?”

“The other, fool. Why do you hesitate?”

The second voice lowered into embarrassed formality. “Pardon
me, sire. But the reports did conflict. I report only what I heard. I did not
witness the fight myself. Samdan maintains he was at the front, but he was
first down, a cut over his eye, then another in his knee. So his glimpse was
merely that. But he insisted that, beside the Ebans and the pirate Zathdar,
there was a young man in strange garb, a white shirt with odd letters. Tall,
with a hawk nose, like the old king. Hair worn back in many braids.”

They had stopped. Sun turned her head, gauging their
position by sound: standing by the old refectory table that had been shoved
into the far corner.

“Well?”

“It was Lankinar who insisted this person was actually a
female. He said that the clothes were quite strange. Trousers much like deck
trousers on ships, yet different, the shirt made like body singlets, but worn
with nothing over it. So it was revealing, ah . . .”

Amused despite herself, Sun wondered how Mr. Official Voice
was going to get around the sorts of personal details that no one ever seems to
like discussing in official reports to your superior, whatever world you are
on. Especially when the personal bits belonged to the likes of kings, queens,
and so forth.

The man cleared his throat and tried again in a tone utterly
devoid of human emotion. “Lankinar insists there was no male body in those
clothes, and most of the others now agree. They saw a man possibly because they
expected to see a man, possibly because she was tall, possibly because she
fought as well as the pirate.”

“Hawk nose, you say?” Canary let out a long breath.
“Damnation. They’re back. Or at least one of them.”

“Who, sire?”

“Never mind. Now, my last question. Where is my son? All of
you have been avoiding that question,” he added grimly, with a hint of the old
laughter Sun remembered. “Which is why I had to drop my own work to oversee
his. Is Jehan drunk in a tavern somewhere? Or holed up with some pretty minstrel
girl who caught his eye?”

“Uh, no, sire. Prince Jehan did detail the extra ridings to
us, you’ll remember.”

“Don’t excuse him. Tell me where he is.”

“He rode down to Sarendan. A sculptor. Famed, he said.
Wanted to pose for him. Present you with a marble bust as a surprise.”

Canary gave a bitter laugh, and Sun remembered him long ago
saying,
My boy is too much like his
mother
. His heels rang on the floor as he moved through the door. “Finish
the search, and send someone to remind Jehan that art, though no doubt
admirable, must wait on events . . .” Their voices faded.