King of Swords (The Starfolk) (5 page)

Two sixteen-ounce steaks, six eggs over easy, two hash browns, four hotcakes with maple syrup, a ham and cheese sandwich, three helpings of pie and ice cream, and about a liter of orange juice later, he said, “No thanks,” when the waitress brought back the menu yet again.

Mira held out five fifty-dollar bills and told him to keep the change.

He managed to refuse. It wasn’t easy.

“You can pay me back later.”

“Not unless you give me your permanent address.” And her real name. He knew she’d refuse.

Her smile told him that she knew exactly what he was thinking. “Let’s do it this way, then. Honor system. You have no boots, sonny. You need this money now. Don’t pay it back, pay it forward: when you don’t need it anymore, pass it along to someone who does.”

To his shame, he thanked her and stuffed the bills in his pocket.

B
y the time they reached Nanaimo’s urban sprawl, rain was pelting down.

Rigel said, “Noah’s Flood, the remake.”

“With an all-new cast.”

“We have lots of time for the ferry. There’s a Walmart on Aulds Road,” he suggested hopefully. “I need new jeans and boots. And sunglasses.”

“Won’t be much of a run on those today. Does the light bother you?”

“No, the stares do.”

“Oh, Rigel! People just think you’re an albino.”

“Albinos have red eyes.”

“But how many people know that? Very pale gray eyes aren’t that rare. Keep a shirt on and you’re a high-octane stud with the cutest buns this side of the Mississippi. If I were in the mood for cradle robbing I’d have had your diapers off long ago.”

“
Ahem!
You did, last night.”

“And you went to sleep on me. How do you think that makes a girl feel?” She smiled at him, and then after a couple
moments of silence, she said, “Are you sure you’re okay with going back to Vancouver?”

“Vancouver is great.” Joey Lotbiniere would lend him a guitar, and he earned as much busking in Granville Island Market as he ever did anywhere. He would go back to public lamentation for lost loves he had never known and sins he had never been able to afford.

The Walmart parking lot was surprisingly crowded for this early in the morning. Mira parked as close to the door as she could and sprinted across the tarmac. He followed more slowly out of respect for his still-tender wounds. He needed new boots, jeans, and if the money would stretch, a spare shirt. He preferred to buy at thrift shops when he could, but a guy over 195 centimeters and under seventy kilos had trouble finding new clothes that fit, let alone castoffs. He joined Mira inside the mercury-lit blimp hangar.

“I need another suitcase,” she said. “See you back here in fifteen?”

He said fine and strode off in the direction of Men’s Footwear, weaving in and out of clusters of strollers, chattering women, bawling toddlers, and elders on walkers. The store wasn’t crowded, but it still held more people than he’d seen in one place in the last three weeks. A small lady asked him if he could lift down one of
those
for her, and he happily obliged. That happened at least once every time he entered a big-box store like this one.

Coffeemakers: hundreds of coffeemakers! Scores of different sizes and brands. Who needed all of them? Who bought them? Did they need one in every room? Did coffeemakers go out of style after a month or so? Or just fall apart?

He was cruising along a Kitchenware canyon between columns of plastic containers towering up on his right and cliffs
of stratified china and glassware on his left when he felt a sudden tingle from his bracelet. He spun around but saw nothing untoward behind him. Imagination!
With paranoia you are never alone…
He decided to go back, though, moving cautiously. The bracelet kept tingling without getting stronger or weaker. Should he head for Gardening, say, and arm himself with a pitchfork or whatever else looked lethal? Or should he just trust the bracelet, which seemed to have an appropriate response for every possible danger? Or should he just shift his butt the hell out of the store and wait for Mira at the Winnebago?

He reached a cross-aisle. Looking both ways like a child crossing the road, he made eye contact with a burly, unshaven, dirty-looking man about five meters away. The man snarled at him, ripped open the package he was holding, and pulled out a carving knife. He bawled out an obscenity and charged.

Nobody can undo store packaging with their bare hands
, Rigel thought inanely. He took to his heels and ran straight ahead, ignoring stabs of pain from his scabs. Halfway up that aisle a pregnant woman screamed at him and released the stroller she was pushing so she could grab a toaster off the shelf beside her and throw it at his face.

He batted it aside with his iron glove and kept right on moving. Still screaming, she hurled a stainless steel coffeepot and he treated that the same way. He did register the fact that he had not been wearing a gauntlet a few seconds ago, but he was in too much of a hurry to consider the ramifications; he just had time for the fleeting thought that it was the same glove that had formed around his fist that time in Vancouver. As he jostled past the woman, she tried to claw his eyes out, so he had to elbow her out of the way more roughly than he would have liked. Another man came rushing around the corner
ahead of him. This one was younger and better dressed than the first. He was armed with a wood ax.

Another missile struck Rigel in the back, but did him no harm. He continued to run, heading straight for Wood Ax, who raised his weapon two-handed to strike. Rigel extended his sword at arm’s length—where had that come from?—and realized too late what was about to happen. His feet and arm had taken on a life of their own, and all of his muscles were out of his control. The sword ran the man through cleanly. The worst part was that it met with almost no resistance anywhere; it was like stabbing soft ice cream. Human beings should not die so easily! Their combined momentum slammed the two of them together. Rigel cried out in horror, but Wood Ax just collapsed, convincingly dead.

Rigel yanked his sword free, wasting no time on wondering where the damned thing had come from or the mailed gauntlet that held it. He turned—it felt more as if the sword turned him—just in time to parry a downward jab from Carving Knife, who had followed him. The man was obviously no fighter, for he was clutching his weapon like a tennis racket, but he was certainly a dangerous maniac, spitting foam and curses. The sword took no chances with him. Before he could strike again, it slashed him across the throat.

Appalled, Rigel backed away from the second corpse. He hadn’t meant to kill anyone.
The sword made me do it!
How could he ever explain that? Had these men been sent by Mira’s jealous Micah? So soon? And the pregnant woman, who had abandoned the stroller and was even now struggling to pick up the knife? This was madness. Nobody hired pregnant women to beat people up!

Mira! Rigel jumped over Wood Ax’s body and raced off in search of Mira. There was definitely something odd about
Mira. Two mysteries—the woman who had appeared so dramatically and inexplicably in his life and this mob insanity. She was the one who had told him to assume that the mystery of his bracelet and the mystery of his parentage must be related. Perhaps she had somehow caused this riot. If so, she was probably the only one who could put a stop to it.

The madness had spread. Women were screaming, men shouting. Rigel himself was splattered with two men’s blood and brandishing a gory blade that was more than a meter long and apparently razor sharp.

Luggage… luggage… where would they keep the luggage? He rounded a corner and almost ran into a middle-aged, blue-rinsed female employee engaged in restocking stationery. She looked up with a smile, which turned into a shriek when she saw the blood-spattered monster looming over her.

“Luggage?” he said. “Where can I find luggage?”

She leaped at him and tried to claw out his eyes. He pushed her aside so roughly that she sat down hard on the floor, while he fled back the way he had come. He found a broader thoroughfare in the middle of the store. His appearance was greeted with screams of triumph as a crowd of fifty or more people surged at him, many of them pushing shopping carts ahead of them like tanks. Some in the back of the mob began lobbing mortar bombs of merchandise over the heads of those in the front.

A fire alarm erupted in intolerable clamor. Someone must have dialed 911 by now, and cops would soon be swarming the store like ants. Guessing that Mira would head for the front door, he went in what he thought was that direction.

But another mob promptly spilled toward him around a corner—shoppers, clerks, cashiers leaving their tills, many of them wielding wire shopping baskets like weapons. For some
reason, he had become a leper and the sight of him was enough to arouse a lynch mob. Trapped between the two ravening hordes, he dived into yet another merchandise canyon. Mira was facing in his direction with her feet apart, both hands gripping her damnable gun. She wasn’t aiming at him, though, but at a man in between them, who was striding toward her with a golf club raised to strike. Rigel was pleased to know that he wasn’t the only pariah, but why had the entire shopping population of Nanaimo gone homicidally berserk? And why were they only attacking him and Mira?
Attention shoppers! The drug-peddling pedophile terrorist in aisle nine…
Mira’s mouth was moving. No doubt she was shouting at her assailant and possibly he was shouting back at her, but whatever they were saying was inaudible under the cacophony of the fire alarm and the mob.

Rigel wanted to scream at her to put the damned gun away. The Canadian judicial system went ballistic at the slightest hint of handguns. Handguns implied gang warfare; they were illegal, smuggled in from the United States, and they carried extra penalties. More urgent was the fact that he was directly in her line of fire. The sword lurched forward, taking him with it. He turned his face away, but couldn’t avoid feeling the impact as the blade sliced into the would-be golfer’s back.

He looked again. Mira was still shouting inaudibly, but now she seemed to be shouting at him. The golfer squirmed on the floor, horribly wounded and probably dying. She lowered her gun, freeing one shaky hand to point. The head-splitting tumult suddenly shrank to a distant whisper, as if a glass bubble had closed around them. No, Mira was not looking at Rigel; she was looking past him, at a tidal wave of men and women—mostly women—that had jammed into the aisle in a frenzied effort to reach their intended victims. Those in the front line
were being buried by people scrambling over them and by avalanches of merchandise toppling from the high display racks.

“You all right?” he asked, and he heard his own voice perfectly well. Another mob was coming from the other direction. The two of them were about to be stomped into mush.

But no! That mob, also, suddenly stopped advancing. It began piling up higher and higher, beating itself against nothing, as if an invisible sheet of glass had intervened between it and its desired victims. Rigel saw missiles bounce off the intangible barrier, saw people being squelched against it, as the mob kept trying to surge forward. The same thing had happened on both sides, as if he and Mira were enclosed in a science fiction force field.

He felt sick.
Stop! Stop!

Then they had company.

He was not accustomed to looking up at people, but the newcomer was certainly taller than he was, likely more than two meters, not counting the huge, pointed ears set on top of his head like a cat’s. Even so, he might weigh no more than Rigel, because he was slender as a wand. That he had neither nipples nor a navel was immediately evident because his only garment was a shimmering kilt set low on hips that didn’t look capable of holding up a rubber band. Nice beachwear, but not really practical for shopping. He sported numerous metallic bracelets on his wrists and ankles, many jeweled studs around the edges of his feline ears, and a thin staff of polished wood taller then himself, bound with bands of many colors. His hair was a velvet cap of spun gold, and his irises shone amber to match. He loomed over Rigel like a string colossus, frowning down at the bloody scene around them. Despite his bare feet and near-nudity, he projected an aura of power and authority that made a man’s knees want to buckle into obeisance.

But Rigel wanted to scream with joy. Whatever or whoever this newcomer was, he obviously belonged to the same species as Rigel, or close to it.
Rigel Estell was no longer alone in the Universe!
Unable to offer a hand to shake, because his right hand was still enclosed in a steel glove and clutching a bloody sword, he bowed. “Delighted to meet you, Mr. Fomalhaut.”

“You know this monster?” Mira wailed.

“I never set eyes on him before. But that’s his name.”

“Correct.” The stranger’s voice was pure song, as sweet as the call of a flute. “You having presently no further requirement for that gruesome weaponry, Rigel Halfling, I do demand that you now diligently decommission it.”

Rigel glanced guiltily at the bloody blade. “I don’t know how to do that, sir.”

“
Lower it,
you incompetent freak!”

Rigel pointed his sword at the ground, and both sword and gauntlet immediately vanished. His arm was spattered with blood down to his bracelet, but his hand and wrist were dry and clean.

“Where did you come from, halfling? Who is your sponsor, and who granted you the authority to extrovert?”

“I regret that I have not the slightest idea what your lordship means.” Rigel could hear sirens. They were barely audible over the muted fire alarm, but he strongly suspected that the police were just outside in the parking lot. He hoped there were ambulances there too, because there must be dozens of injured people in those writhing heaps of humanity. At the same time, he felt a certain urgency about taking his leave before people began posing questions and asking for ID.

He glanced at Mira, who was still staring openmouthed at the apparition.

The giant said, “Who gave you that amulet?”