Eric Flint - The Shadow of the Lion

Or was he? No?no, there was someone coming. Or forming rather, out of the dark and the mist. Another woman.

For a moment he thought it might be another avatar of the Goddess. Then with a chill of real fear he recognized her. Lorendana Valdosta?once a Montagnard agent herself and dead at the hands of the Visconti's assassins these five years gone. He knew she was dead, and for a certainty. He'd been there when Aleri had given the order; and Bespi himself had slid in the blade while Lorendana's new lover Aldanto held her silent and immobile.

She had been the key Montagnard information-drop in Venice, but she had also been loose-tongued and incredibly reckless. Never less so, Bespi had realized later, than when she'd personally insulted Duke Filippo Visconti by spurning his advances. That knowledge had been the thing, more than any other, which had finally crystallized Bespi's growing disillusionment with the Milanese. He had uncaringly killed a woman for being?so he'd been told?a danger to the cause. The knowledge that he'd actually killed her for no more reason than the duke's personal disgruntlement, when it finally came to him, had been… unbearable. He'd realized then that he'd been as gullible as the woman he'd murdered.

She didn't look too gullible now?

"Bespi," a voice said… seemingly inside his head. "I see you?"

He blocked his ears, but it did no good. The ghostly voice cut right through him; the almond eyes did the same. She was stark-naked, her well-formed ivory flesh floating in a cloud of smoke and fog and midnight-black hair, obliquely slanted black eyes cold as the grave?she aroused no desire with her weird nudity; he'd never wanted a woman less.

Bespi. You carry my curse. Do you wish to be free of it?

A low moan came from his throat.

My curse shall follow you wherever you go. Her eyes grew until they filled his entire field of vision, black and like looking into hell. He felt ghostly hands running down his arms, leaving chill trails behind them. When you sleep, I shall be there?waiting. When you wake, I shall follow; in all your comings, in all your goings, I shall be one step behind you, making you careless, making you nervous, until one day you will make a mistake?then my fingers will close about your throat?

"Wait!" he yelled. Panic snatched at him now. Dread he had never felt in dealing with the living, or the soon-to-be-dead, closed around his heart and squeezed it like an invisible hand reaching through his chest-wall. He panted. Whimpered… "I'll do anything you want!"

The eyes receded and again she floated before him in her cloud of smoke and hair and magic. Then guard my sons.

That caught him off guard. "Huh?" he replied stupidly, unable to fathom the puzzle.

My sons live, Harrow. Bespi who was. Guard them. Guard them well. Keep them from harm. Keep the Montagnards from their throats. Only then my curse will leave you.

"I don't?I mean I don't even know what they look like. How… how do I find them!"

There?she pointed and something began forming out of the smoke and the dark beside her. The foggy image of an adolescent?sixteen, seventeen, maybe. A dead ringer for Lorendana. That is Marco.

Bespi/Harrow gasped as he recognized the boy. The one who had killed Gianni! The boy with the great reasons! Harrow could now understand why he had been witness to the sight.

And there?

Beside the first, a boy about two years younger; Carlo Sforza as a kid.

That is Benito. Guard them, Harrow. Your life on it, or you will carry my curse forever.

He had barely sworn to it, when she faded away and his grasp on consciousness went with her.

Luciano was well pleased with himself. That had been one of the better vision-quests he'd sent Harrow on. The former assassin hadn't fought him, he had responded beautifully to all the suggestions. He hoped the sending of Marco's brother was right. He'd only seen the boy once, but somehow it had seemed a good touch. These were just small magics, true. But he did not dare to try greater magic than this. Not without calling the sort of attention that he didn't want onto himself.

Harrow came around gradually. He wasn't a particularly pretty sight, with half his head scarred and the rest of him splotchy with burned skin. He coughed a good deal too: a gift from the smoke and the water he'd breathed in. But he was functional; indeed, he'd healed better and faster than Luciano had thought likely. The new vessel of the Goddess sat up slowly, uncurling from his nest of reeds and rags and old blankets. He blinked at the sun, and then at Luciano, his dilated eyes not focusing properly.

"Well?" asked Luciano.

"I got?a thing?I got to do," the man said through stiff lips, eyes still hazed with the drug.

"The Goddess gave you a task, huh?"

"But I don't?I don't?I got to take care of a couple of children?" His pupils were still dilated, but there was a certain despair in his voice. Luciano kept his satisfaction shuttered behind his own stony expression as he crouched down next to Harrow in the reeds.

"So?"

"But?how the hell am I going find her children?"

"What children? Whose children?"

"Valdosta. Marco and Benito Valdosta." If Harrow was confused about why the Goddess would be concerned over the welfare of Lorendana's two children, he wasn't showing it. But then Harrow had never been strong on logic. "How the hell am I going to find them?"

Luciano spread his arms wide with his hands palm-upwards and looked to the sky, taking on dignity and power as he deepened his voice. This was the part he played the best? He knew, thanks to another very minor piece of magic, that the former Montagnard assassin now saw him haloed in a haze of dim white light. Every time he took that particular pose, Harrow would see him glowing with the power of the Goddess. "Praise be the Goddess. Blessed are the vessels of her will. Her ways are beyond all mortal understanding."

He lowered his eyes to meet Harrow's. "She has you in Her plan, Harrow; She's had you there from the start of the world. She weaves the threads of destiny on her loom! Marco Valdosta is right here, Harrow; in the swamp. He's hiding out, an' he's scared. He damn-well needs protecting; he's a good child and this here is a bad place. But he's nervous and he's touchy; he won't let nobody near him, except them as he knows, like me and Sophia. You want to watch over him, fine. That's the Goddess's will. But if you show yourself, he'll run, I can promise that. If he even guesses you're there, he'll run. You want to keep him from running further and right into more trouble, you stay right out of sight."

As Harrow nodded understanding, Luciano rose and stepped off the islet into the knee-deep murky water of the swamp. Harrow followed, showing no more discomfort than Luciano.

"Come on, then?I'll show you where to keep watch on him without him knowing you're there."

Marco's hands ached with the cold as he worked without really thinking about what he was doing. He was trying to hold his mind in a kind of numb limbo, as numb as the rest of him was getting. He was doing his best to avoid thinking, to just exist. The cold and the damp were making his nose run and the slap of water and the hushing of wind in the reeds and the little sounds he was making were punctuated by his sniffles.

His raft and hideout had been where he'd left them?and as he'd expected?they'd been stripped. The hidey was still in surprisingly good shape, all things considered. Marco was grateful. He hadn't had much other good luck lately.

Even with the water level in the swamp at high water, it had been cruel, hard work to pole the raft out of his old territory and into Gianni's.

Gianni had ruled one of the best territories in the marsh. There was an unobstructed view of the city across the water and a nice stock of food plants as well as two really good fishing holes and a couple of solid islets. Marco's arms and back were screaming with pain before he got his home to its new location and, if he hadn't been working, he'd have been three-quarters frozen. As it was he was soaked to the skin and glad of the change of dry clothes in his pack. He had moored the raft up against the islet. With the camouflaging hideout over it, it would look like an extension of the island.