11.07.08
Eyes.
A hand reached down and snatched off Ekion’s glasses. “Huh,” said Iason.
Ekion glared up at the other siren. “What?”
“You’re not wearing contacts.”
“You noticed.” Ekion blinked rapidly. The flickering images the wind carried him were rapidly getting annoying. “Can I have my glasses back?”
Iason turned them over. “Do you even need them anymore?”
Ekion extended his hand with another glare.
“I mean, they’re not ground for correction. They’re just weirdly tinted.”
“Can. I. Have. My. Glasses. Back. Please.“
Iason looked him square in the eyes. “Not until you tell me why your eyes aren’t blue anymore.”
Ekion sighed. “I don’t know, okay? I woke up one day a while ago, and my eyes were sort of purple and I couldn’t see with my old prescription. They got redder and sharper as the month progressed.”
“So why are you wearing glasses at all, if you now have perfect vision?”
A hand reached out of the wall and swiped the glasses from Iason, startling the siren into nearly falling off the ledge. “He already answered your question,” Nathan said from somewhere inside the masonry.
Ekion grinned, took his glasses from his lover, and sauntered off down the hallway.
04.10.08
Heizhan Thinks.
I.
If I didn’t know for certain he was still alive, I would have thought Maboroshi was a ghost. But no, I’ve felt the strong pulse that beats in his wrist, and I’ve seen the warm red blood that spills from him when he is cut. Still, though…
He is so gray. He fades into the background just by existing. Of course, part of that is his coloring and his choice of clothing – nothing melds with shadows quite like gray.
He’s the only person I’ve ever met whose personality can be described by a color, though. He fades away mentally, as well. When he’s not actually interacting with someone, he’s just not there. It’s the creepiest thing I’ve ever seen.
I want so badly to kill him, but Nathan would disapprove.
II.
Ekion is a simple, straightforward sort. He’s a guardsman – Nathan’s guardsman, at that – and he does his job quickly and effectively. There’s nothing more to him than that.
At least, that’s what everyone thinks.
It takes a peculiar sort of genius to be so simple; Teleika, from what I’ve seen of her, has some of that talent herself. But Ekion’s genius lies in his directness – he says what is on his mind, he does what he decides to do, and manages to put the most complex plots to shame at the same time.
Fortunately for us both, we will never cross each other. He is the kind of person I would have to kill, otherwise.
III.
He is, quite probably, the only person alive who would appoint his would-be killer to a government position. Not that I really wanted it, but Nathan was rather persuasive (if you consider a knife to the eye persuasive).
I still don’t know why he chose me for the job. I certainly don’t know how he got the Council to approve my appointment. You can’t threaten that many people at once. (Well, you can, but only if you want to end up on a one-way trip to the Phantom Islands.)
The thing that still amazes me is that the people I’m now commanding (the people I’m responsible for – curse him) actually listen to me.
Nathan says that they recognize an able commander when they see one. I think he’s optimistic.
Ekion says I remind them of my predecessor. I wonder what General Thaziazhsta did, that I remind people of her…
Most People.
Most people expected a general and a guardsman to be able to fight. The fact that the guardsman in question happened to be a cliff-wight and that the general happened to be a notorious serial killer only enhanced their reputation. Most people forgot that the General could barely use his left hand, and that Ekion had trouble seeing.
Most observant people recognized that Maboroshi was dangerous, too. Anybody who failed to notice the outlines of his hidden sheaths and threatened him anyway quickly learned one other thing about the aide – he could move like a snake. For all that, though, he’d had little formal training, and a skilled fighter could still get the upper hand.
Most people, though, seemed to forget that the king could fight, too. In fact, Heizhan mused as he watched the would-be assassin slip through the window behind Nathan, he was probably the best of them all, at least when it came to unarmed combat.
Heizhan winced as Nathan’s fist connected with the assassin’s ribs, remembering all too clearly how it felt to be on the receiving end of such a blow. The king hit like a mule kicks; Heizhan could hear the unfortunate man’s bones crack from all the way across the room.
The assassin wisely threw dignity to the wind and fled out the window. Nathan calmly returned to his seat.
The Council stared at him in varying degrees of shock. Heizhan could see Arawn in the background, laughing silently.
Most people forgot, the General mused, that the person who’d stopped a certain notorious serial killer, who could hold his own with the best of the Guard, and who had repeatedly avoided death at the hands of a skittish revenant, currently occupied the throne.
The Sun at Midday.
It was not every day, Ekion reflected, that one found the King of Annwn crouched above a doorway, trying desperately to keep his balance on the narrow lintel. Grinning, the pale Siren paused to look up at his friend.
“What, exactly, are you doing?”
Startled, Nathan Thaziazhsta nearly lost his balance. Only a timely grab for the wall spared him an ungainly fall. Irritated, he turned to his General. “Shhh!”
Bemused, Ekion just stared. “Wha-?”
“Sh! She’ll hear you!”
“Who-?”
The sound of a door opening attracted their attention. Frantically, Nathan motioned for Ekion to stop staring at him. Thoroughly confused, the Siren turned to go inside –
- Only to nearly collide with a small girl.
Despite her messy red hair, which no one else in her family possessed, only an idiot would have missed the resemblance between Lith and Nathan. Serious gold eyes regarded Ekion for a moment before the tiny girl continued marching resolutely down the outdoor corridor.
She got only about twenty feet before she stopped, turning back with a narrow-eyed expression so much like her grandmother’s that Ekion couldn’t breathe. Deliberately, the small girl walked back to the doorway, peering up at the lintel.
Grinning rather uncharacteristically, her uncle looked down at her. “I guess you found me, Lith,” Nathan said.
Lith’s serious expression lightened into a broad grin. “Found you! Found you!” sang the girl, jumping in circles and waving her arms in a strange sort of victory dance.
“You did,” repeated her uncle before jumping down. Cheerfully, the little redhead threw herself at Nathan, who caught her and swung her up to sit on his shoulders. “Come, let’s find your mother…”
Smiling, Ekion followed the two down the hall. Truly, that girl was aptly named…
Problems.
Ekion stood in the doorway, watching his ward pace. “Nathan?”
Nathan turned, his gold eyes slightly wild. “What?” His voice was still even, Ekion noticed with relief.
The siren walked toward his ward. “What’s wrong?” And the conference had been going so well, too.
Nathan made a cutting motion. Ekion stopped obligingly.
“Nathan?” Ekion’s voice was soft.
“It’s nothing.” Ekion frowned; Nathan’s voice was a bit too flat. The glare Nathan directed at the wall should have demolished it.
The weighty silence lengthened.
Sighing explosively, Ekion stalked forward, running a pale hand through his white hair. “Nathan. Tell me what happened, now.”
From a very few people, direct commands worked on Nathan. Fortunately, Ekion was one of those few. It was Nathan’s turn to sigh.
“It was just an impression.”
“What did you touch?”
“A glass, I think, but I wouldn’t be able to find it again.”
Ekion frowned.
Nathan tugged at his blond hair with a dark hand. “There’s someone here.”
“From where?” Getting information from Nathan could be very much like pulling teeth.
Nathan finally turned to face his guard. “From the city I demolished.”
After Being Jumped by Bandits.
“Do you know,” Yehon said conversationally, “what happens when you pick up a desert demon in the middle of a … heh … highly-charged situation?”
The bandit opened his mouth to respond. A deafening crack left everyone’s ears ringing. The bandit holding Yehon collapsed; the others squeaked and ran.
“Idiots,” Yehon muttered dismissively. He looked over at Victor, who was still on the other side of the road. “Something wrong?”
“I’m not stupid enough to go near you while you’re throwing off sparks, loon,” the siren said, polishing his glasses.
Kathleen Wanders.
It was a nice fall day thankfully lacking in humidity, so Professor O’Neill decided to take a walk. To hell with the strangenesses; they couldn’t keep her in her office all day, not on such a nice day as this.
Down by one of the dorms, some students were busy raking up the leaves. Kathleen pondered the growing pile for a minute, then walked on. As much fun as it would be to disrupt the pile, there were no strangenesses there. She’d save it until there were no strangenesses anywhere, and then she’d go leafpile-jumping, no matter what Nora said about immature hobbies.
The odd couple on campus passed Kathleen; she tipped her hat at them as they passed. She liked them well enough, even if Talia’s rats were a little creepy and Roland himself was a little demented. There were no strangenesses there, so they were okay.
—————–
Some miles away, I snorted a laugh and lost the wind I’d inhaled. Annoyed, I exhaled the rest of the scene, and watched the images fade into the still air.
Wildcard.
When I was little, the first thing we learned was “don’t anger the Agents“. Everything else was contingent on that: “don’t leave the village; you’ll anger the Agents”. “Don’t make a fuss. Do you want the Agents to get you?” “Do your work, or the Agents will be angry.” You could hear the capital letter.
The Agents were our bogeymen. We hated them and feared them – hate because they were like us, and fear because they weren’t. We wanted them gone, but we had no power to make them leave. They had built our villages, they traded with us, they protected us in bloody war after bloody war.
And they never let us forget any of it.
When I was older, old enough to work, a different specter loomed: service. “You’d better get that apprenticeship, or you’ll end up in service,” was the way it was usually phrased. Always with the sneer, too.
See, everybody in the village, and in every other village, works. If you aren’t lucky enough or skilled enough to land an apprenticeship, and you don’t sell out and become an Agent, the Agents enroll you in service – and you have no choice. Not really. The Agents draw up a list of jobs you might be suited for, and then you’re either contracted out to private service or, more likely, kept on at some Agency fortress. Technically, you’re not a slave; you can refuse an assignment or an order, but let’s just say there are reasons the Agents are so loathed – and reasons the servants are, too.
I think you can see where this is going. Yeah, not blessed with many skills was I.
I was entering my fifteenth year of service at the North Fork fortress when the third bogeyman of my life took on a terrifying reality.
A wildcard came to North Fork.
We talked about Agents in whispers, and we weren’t much louder when we talked about service.
We didn’t talk about wildcards at all.
Someone, occasionally, would start to say something, but would invariably clam up and jump at shadows the rest of the day. Even more rarely, an elder would pull aside one of us young ones and breathe a quick caution in our ears. You couldn’t call that faint voice a whisper.
“The Agents’ Agents”, they were called. “They’re like shadows,” one elder told me. “Everywhere and nowhere and completely unnoticed, unless they want to be seen, and they hide monsters in their depths.”
We hate and fear the Agents. We look on servants with loathing and pity. We are so terrified of the wildcards that the word looks like an understatement.
You can understand why I wasn’t too happy to discover that my contract was being reviewed by the wildcard.
The Kiss.
Ashmedai slid one hand around the back of Nathan’s head, pulled him forward, and kissed him deeply.
After a minute, he pulled back. “You’ve been watching me all evening. The least I deserve after that kind of ogling is a kiss.” Ashmedai grinned. “And you’re not a bad kisser, either.”
“It’s hard not to watch you when you want to be watched. And I wasn’t ogling you. I’m glad the kiss was up to your standards, though.”
Ashmedai’s grinned broadened, then softened, and he kissed Nathan again. “It’s too bad I never met you until after you were married,” he said, running a fingertip gently over Nathan’s earcuff. “You don’t strike me as the kind of man who’ll sleep with anyone else now.”
“Unfortunately not,” Nathan said, gently pushing the other man back. Ashmedai smiled again, bowed slightly, and melted back into the crowd.
Nathan turned around. “Enjoying the show?”
“Don’t get snippy with me. I wasn’t the one kissing someone other than my husband. And yes, I was.” Ekion grinned. “Too bad you weren’t up for more.”
Nathan stared at his husband for a long time. “It scares me to say this,” he said slowly, “but you’re starting to sound like my mother.”
“I am not!”
Nathan grinned.
A Visit to a Library.
“Tell me, Nathan, just how that book ended up here, anyway,” I said in exasperation. The last thing I really wanted to do was test the effectiveness of wildcard glamours in the middle of a busy human public library.
Nathan looked back at me, amusement glinting in his currently brown eyes. “It was donated by a generous patron, I think.”
“Or a mean one,” I muttered.
Nathan almost smiled. “We should be thankful,” he said. “It hasn’t eaten anyone, apparently.
“Unfortunately,” he said after a moment, “we need someone to tell us, in person, where it is, or it will remain hidden.”
I glared at him. “I doubt even wildcard glamour’s good enough to stand up to close scrutiny.”
“It’s not,” Nathan said, heading toward a short woman bent over a cart of books. I followed, none too happily, and hoped the glamours held.
“Excuse me, miss,” Nathan said, letting a false brightness creep into his voice. “Do you work here?”
The woman sighed, straightened, and turned to face us, one hand still on the cart. “Can I help you?”
I felt myself relax; it was clear that she had trouble seeing, even with her glasses on. She wouldn’t see through the glamours.
“I’m looking for a book.” Nathan held out a slip of paper. “Can you help me find it?”
The woman looked at the paper, then pointed to the far wall. “It should be over in nonfiction, somewhere in the 290s. Fourth or fifth row.” She turned to me, one eyebrow raised.
“I’m with him,” I said.
“Okay. I hope you find it,” the woman said. “If you don’t, ask at Information. It might be on a cart in the back.”
Nathan nodded to her and walked off in the direction she’d indicated. She turned back to her shelving.
A few minutes later, as we left the library with the book, I noticed that the amused glint was back in Nathan’s eyes. “What?” I asked.
“That woman we spoke to … do you know who she was?” I shook my head; Nathan’s eyes crinkled in silent laughter.
“The woman that Arawn’s been talking to in those dreams of his.”
