Wicked Bronze Ambition

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.”