Glen Cook - Shadowline - Starfishers Triology - Book 1

"Gneaus, not my face."

"You want to tell us why Blackworld means so much to you?"

"It's my way out... " Dee shut up. He refused to speak again.

"Cassius, before we leave I want you to position them so they have to look at each other. Put a sound baffle between them so they can't talk. Now, before we tackle my questions again, tell me what you found on The Mountain."

Cassius sketched the story. Storm occasionally interrupted with a question or to make a point. When Cassius mentioned the elderly assassin, he asked, "Sangaree?"

Cassius nodded.

Storm turned to an attractive and frightened Michael Dee. "So that rumor is true. You have been dealing with them. That won't make you any friends, Michael." He shook an admonitory finger. "Go on, Cassius. This is getting interestinger and interestinger."

A minute later Storm muttered, "I've got a feeling I'll be eligible for Social Insurance after I pay your instel bill."

"Possibly. The man's name was Rhafu."

Storm sent a puzzled glance Michael's way. Dee seemed both disappointed and relieved. "It doesn't make sense, Cassius."

"It does. Keep listening." He explained what he had learned from his friend in Luna Command.

"Why would this mystery Sangaree wait till now to get even?"

"I take it he's really a low-key sort. Tries to get everything lined up perfect before he makes his move. He's probably been chipping away at us for a long time."

Storm looked at Dee. "That could explain a lot of things. But not too clearly."

"I've been doing some thinking. It was a long trip out, watch and watch. Not much chance to talk. Mainly, I tried to figure out why a man would want to destroy his brother so bad he would cut a deal with Sangaree. I didn't come up with anything. Each time I thought I had it, I came back to the same thing. The only things you've ever done were in reply to something a Dee did first. Our friend here is a son-of-a-bitch, but in the past he usually took his lumps when he deserved them. And until just lately he was always pretty impersonal about his crap.

"So I went back and thought it through from the beginning. There had to be a clue somewhere.

"I think it started because he wanted to get even with Richard Hawksblood. Including you was a sop for this Deeth creature. In others words, it's not really personal. It's an arrangement. Deeth helps him get Richard. He helps Deeth get you and the Legion."

Storm stared at his brother. Michael looked terribly uncomfortable. "Why the hell would he take up with this Deeth?"

"That's where I had to strain the old logic box. We have to go back to your father and mother to put it together. You know the family stories. He met her on Prefactlas. She was pregnant when they got married. Boris never found out who Michael's father was. Emily wouldn't say. Like that.

"Check my reasoning. Emily was born a Sangaree pleasure girl. Her genetic tagging was distinctly Norbon. We know she spent several years traveling and living with a boy who may have fathered Michael. He vanished completely once your mother moved in with Boris.

"There was a more notorious disappearance at the same time. The grand master of the Prefactlas underworld, a man we called the Serpent. My friend Beckhart tells me the Serpent and this Rhafu are the same guy. Starting to get a picture?"

"I've got one." Storm laid a finger alongside his nose. "And I don't like it. He's not just dealing with them, he is one of them. The son of this Deeth. Implausible on its face, but you found a few crossbreeds on Prefactlas, didn't you?"

"Too many. And from Michael's expression, I'd say we've hit it square."

"Ah, yes. So we have."

"Gneaus, I... " Dee shut up. It was too late for truth or lies.

The silence stretched out. Mouse began to move around nervously, glancing from man to man.

Storm murmured, "The thing takes shape. We know some whos and whys, and even a few hows. Enough to have upset them by recapturing Benjamin and Homer. But that doesn't really change anything. Probably too late to wriggle out."

"We can kill us a few Dees," Cassius suggested. "I grilled Beckhart on this Deeth. There's no way we can get to him. He's moved off Homeworld. His whole outfit is on his First Expansion planet. He's the only bastard in the universe who knows where it is. So how the hell do you bribe some fool Sangaree to go cut his throat? If we want him, we have to make him come to us."

"Michael stays alive. I gave him my word. He may not be as guilty as he looks, anyway."

"Stop making excuses for him, Gneaus."

Storm overlooked Cassius's remark. "He and Fearchild will be safe here. Remember Trojan Hearse? I'll order a go on it, and start hunting Seth-Infinite. If we nail him down too, this Deeth will have to come out if he wants to keep us running. He won't have any cat's-paws left."

"Helga," Mouse suggested.

"She doesn't get around so good anymore," Storm replied. "Warm your instel, Mouse. I've got to talk to Richard."

"We don't have one. We had our wave guides sheered off by friend Michael there," Cassius said. "And we've lost relay contact with your Seiner friend. It'll have to wait till we get back to the Fortress."

"Why are we fooling around here, then? Take me home."

Mouse turned his father's medicare cradle and pushed it into the passage to the ship dock. Michael started screaming behind him.

Cassius had energized the torture machinery.

Cruel men. All cruel men.

A small yacht drifted in normspace. Its pilot patiently watched her hyper scan. She had lost her quarry, but hoped to find it again.

Cassius went hyper. His vessel left a momentarily detectable ripple.

The yacht turned like a questing needle. In a moment it began to accelerate.

Thirty-Seven: 3028 AD

Moira was seventeen when she received the summons. It terrified her. She had heard stories... Not even Blake would force her. Would he?

She had no protector. She had had to do her own fighting since Frog's death. She was tough even for an Edgeward girl. But Blake? Fight a demigod?

Frog had, in his stubborn way.

She looked around the tiny room that had been the dwarf's home, that he had made home for a girl-child abandoned and unwanted by so many better able to provide. She turned an ear to listen for a ghost voice. "Frog, what should I do?"

"Go on, girl. And crank the bastard's nose up his butt if he tries anything."

She really had no choice. Blake was the great bull gorilla boss of Edgeward. They would come and get her if she did not go on her own.

As she prepared, making herself as unattractive as she could, she surveyed the room again. A cool tickle of irrational fear said it might be her last look around.

She had turned it into a museum. Almost a shrine, of and to the crazy dwarf called Frog, whose real name she had never known. There had been no way to show she cared while she lived. She had sensed that he would have been embarrassed by affection. Now, in her most romantic years, with her memories growing ever more vague and rose-lensed, she was, progressively, elevating him to godhead.

Moira did not fit. Edgeward was a black community. She was a curiosity and "old Frog's stray brat." The latter, with the ghost of the mad dwarf always peering over her shoulder, put people off more than did the former.

Old Frog had become a city legend. Edgewarders boasted about him to outsiders. The Man Who Ended the Shadowline. They had brought in his tractor and made a memorial of it. But he still made them nervous.

Dead and canonized was where madmen belonged. His mind had been diseased. They feared Moira might be a carrier.

They did not know what to say or do around her, so they did nothing. She was an outcast without justification, lonely, given far too much time to brood. The pressures of her fellow citizens' trepidations and expectations were creating the thing they feared.