Glen Cook - Wicked Bronze Ambition

Inspiration had overwhelmed me.

“Back to the street, then. Everyone.” Dogs yawned, still loafing in people’s arms.

People moved without asking a bunch of questions. I appreciate that when it’s me wanting to get things done.

“We’re outside,” Moonblight said. “Now what?”

“Get into the place you were before, with your mutt. Orchidia, give yours to Hagekagome and put her in your place. Singe, same with Penny. We’ll fly. You lock the door. Strafa will come right back for you.”

Singe didn’t like the plan. Orchidia, though, understood. Singe chose to defer to her wisdom, though she couldn’t help saying, “Do not do anything stupid before I get there.”

“Hearing you five by five, Mom.”

Singe didn’t care where we were headed. She figured I could do something dumb and inconvenient anywhere.

Orchidia chivied everyone in tight around Strafa, who rotated to face me again, adding something extra as a message to Hagekagome, who never noticed. I was embarrassed about being the object of jealousy between children-even though, in a way, both were really my own age.

Singe was locking the door as we lifted off.

Neither Dean nor the Dead Man had made themselves evident at all.

I hoped no watcher got a wild hair and tried to break in. They might actually get away with something now.

Strafa whispered, “To the ridge in the cemetery?”

“You know my mind perfectly.”

“I am your wife. I will be your wife.” Stated with absolute conviction and an understood “No matter what!” “The view will be a little remote, but there won’t be any crowding. Not even the ghosts will get in the way of our conversation.”

My wife. There might be some social difficulties till she looked old enough for the job. Say, another three or four years. Plenty of girls get married, to get out of the house, by age fifteen. They wait five more years after that, even their overly protective fathers start calling them old maids.

Maybe by the time Little Strafa was ready for a real husband, she’d want someone a little more spry than the antique fart that I would be.

The big fireworks show always takes place on the waterfront at the foot of the Street of the Gods. The actual launching is done from barges anchored out. That’s safer. Maybe once a decade somebody screws up, does something royally stupid, and all the fireworks on a barge explode at once, resulting in a dead stupid guy who takes along any friends dumb enough to work with him, plus countless catfish whose deaths are less in vain because they get to participate mightily in numerous All-Souls feasts.

The barges were a lesson hard-learned. A century ago a thousand people died in a Great Fire following a fireworks mishap.

TunFaire has had half a dozen Great Fires over the ages.

It was chilly on the ridge. The dogs woke up and gamboled a bit, making plenty of noise. I found a good place to sit. There was moonlight enough to limn the city skyline. Chattaree’s spires stood out. A tail of smoke still leaned west from the cathedral, a little orange and red at its root.

Penny and Hagekagome settled beside me, right and left, crowding in for warmth. Penny said, “I should have thought about coats.”

Behind us, Tara Chayne chuckled. “Then you wouldn’t have an excuse.”

The first shell went up a few minutes later. The scattered fireworks we’d seen earlier were neighborhood efforts or kid stunts. I said, “I heard the Crown is kicking in this year.”

Tara Chayne responded, “The army donated several tons of surplus.”

Whoa! That could get showy if it included anything besides signal rockets. What they threw up at enemy Windwalkers and broom riders, flying thunder lizards, or anything else that might attack from above would be showier and louder than anything civilians ever saw.

Tara Chayne settled to her knees and hams behind me, close enough for me to feel her warmth. Hakekagome wasn’t shy about snuggling up and getting a two-hand death grip on my left arm. Penny maintained a careful little gap. Nasty old Tara Chayne whispered, “Make a memory, girl,” and pushed her.

Wild dogs came out of the dark. They invested no time in greeting rituals. They just made themselves comfortable. Brownie had made herself at home in my lap already.

Then the first army star shell went up. It didn’t throw off fancy colors, just created a globe of ferociously deadly lesser fireballs that expanded more than a hundred yards before the fade began. No magic there, just chemistry. Chemistry able to sear holes through half an inch of steel were anyone strong enough to carry that much armor aloft.

The fire faded with “oohs,” and “aahs,” muted by distance.

The next shell was also surplus, less obviously dramatic. It created a cloud lighted by an inner fire that spun off lightning bolts. Those would have made passage problematic for anything sharing that airspace.

Some of the cemetery mutts raised their heads, flicked their ears, made soft, interrogative noises. Brownie answered with a sound closer to a purr than anything normally made by a dog. The others dropped their chins back onto their paws.

Little Strafa dropped out of the night with Singe and Orchidia, Singe straining to appear unflustered. Clearly, the ladies had shared a lively conversation while they were airborne.

Orchidia announced, “We ran into some gargoyles. They lit out. They didn’t want to talk.”

Strafa said, “They weren’t dumb enough to try anything. But they did curse us in their own dialect.”

They had a language?

Orchidia said, “They were looking for friends who never came home from a job in the city. They may have blamed us.”

Singe asked, “What have we missed?” She eyed Hagekagome and Penny fiercely. Little Strafa also gave Penny a dark look.

“They just started.”

Singe bullied a couple of mutts and made herself a place beside Penny. Orchidia did the same by Hagekagome, even laying a hand on the pretty girl’s back. Hagekagome seemed pleased. Little Strafa made her place behind me, on her knees like Tara Chayne. She pushed Moonblight over behind Penny but still stayed partly behind Hagekagome. She didn’t do or say anything to the pretty girl. The pretty girl paid no attention to her. She stayed where she was, snuggled up tight.

Over my left shoulder I said, “So you were actually looking out for me the last couple days?”

The fireworks began to pick up.

“After I figured out who I was. Jiffy helped me with that.”

Orchidia said, “Jiffy would be the big guy.”

“Um.” I sort of figured.

“At first I didn’t know anything. I headed for Grandmother’s house. I guess that was instinct. I didn’t know why, or who she was. It just seemed like the place to go.” She rested her hands on my shoulders. They were shaky.

I said, “I’ve worked some of it out, but I can’t get it to make sense without figuring in truly boggling levels of incompetence.”

“Then you don’t have it figured out,” Orchidia said. “Though you’re right about the incompetence.”

A colorful barrage fixed our attention briefly; then Moonslight took it up. “Any sense anything made would likely do so only if you’d spent your life on the Hill. Only somebody who thinks like Constance Algarda could have done what she did to abort Meyness Stornes’s ambitions.”

“She knew about him?”

“Not specifically. She sensed a new tournament taking shape. She’d been watching for it. She called us in. Like everybody else, though, she thought that Meyness hadn’t come home from the Cantard.”

Strafa said, “I never made it to Grandmother’s house. I ran into Jiffy and Min. They saw that I was scared and confused and crying and didn’t know who I was, or where. They thought they were being kind by not letting me get to Grandmother. They had just come away from her and thought she was too wicked for any little girl to be around.”