Out of Nowhere (The Immortal Vagabond Healer Book 1) (6 page)

When it popped up, I put it on a plate, arranged the bacon, eggs and homefries around it, then poured the excess bacon grease from the pan back into the cup. Never waste bacon fat. I’d learned that long ago, when starvation was a bigger concern for the average person than obesity. And it makes everything taste delicious. Butter flavored cooking spray is humanity’s worst idea since racism.

After eating, I dug out the knife I’d snagged from the scene of the assault. It wasn’t a common lock knife or even a hunting or combat knife, not any that I recognized. It was a knife-fighter’s weapon. The blade was six inches long, broad and single-edged, with a cross guard and a wire-wrapped leather grip. It wasn’t highly polished steel, but dark, with the rippled pattern of watered steel, which I hadn’t seen in a very long time. Along the back edge, near the hilt were some... symbols. Letters, maybe, but not that I recognized. I couldn’t even identify an alphabet.

Was the attack connected to the foreign patient who was asking about me?

I was sure it had to be. Not prove-it-in-court sure, but sure enough. A vaguely familiar accent I couldn’t place, a man looking for me, and then an attack with a knife with writing I didn’t recognize, all in the space of a week.

We don’t get attacked very often. Even gang members don’t generally mess with us. They know we don’t really have any agenda against them, and sooner or later every gangbanger will get shot or cut or one of his buddies will, and none of them wants the ambulance to be hesitant to get to his street. Once in a while a domestic-violence call might suck us in to the chaos, and drugs or alcohol or psychosis can make patients unpredictable enough to prove a threat, but that isn’t what happened at Dugan’s.

Those guys were stone-cold sober. That was a planned ambush.

* * * *

I killed the morning fairly unproductively. I didn’t have enough information to do anything more than make wild guesses.

That afternoon, I gave up and went by the local college and stopped in on the fencing class. I was technically a part-time student, since I took a class a semester, just to keep boredom at bay, and I knew the instructor from the fencing club. He was always happy to have an extra assistant to poke with a foil. I just wanted a distraction from thinking about the attack.

The concentration required to fence generally helped clear my head. It gave me the strategy, concentration and physical exertion, as well as the rush of competition I always enjoyed, without anybody needing to die.

I served as a practice partner for the class, and hung around to spar with Bill, the coach, for a bit. A few other students did the same.

‘Not tired of being hit by now?’ asked Bill, saluting and donning his mask.

‘Just so long as I can hit back,’ I grinned.

We came
en garde,
and after beating his blade against mine a few times, feeling me out, he lunged. I parried and threw a quick riposte at his chest, but he just managed to stop it, retreating back a step. I followed him with a strong feint, then disengaged under his parry, catching him in the shoulder.

After that, he tightened up his guard, stopping everything I threw and flicking his point out in rapid, deceptive attacks. He quickly racked up a few points on me.

I answered back, scoring one point through guile and another through pure luck, as he tried to beat my blade, missed and advanced, allowing me to pretty much lean forward and lay the point on his chest.

That annoyed him, and he shifted into higher gear, landing two more touches in rapid succession. Bill is a better fencer than I am. I’m not really a fencer at all. I’m a swordsman. For all that I love fencing, it’s just playing tag with blunt swords. My years of training were all geared toward keeping sharp steel out of me and putting it in the other fellow. My instincts are less about lightning flicks of the point and more about firm, decisive attacks and overly secure parries. I’m good enough to beat novices, and hold my own with experienced fencers, but a master can land five touches on me without breaking a sweat.

In a real duel, those five touches would be scratches that would hardly slow me down, let alone stop me shoving a foot of steel through him, but a touch is a touch.

Now that he had me panting, he drove me back, holding his guard close and making swift attacks, steadily advancing. I parried frantically, giving ground, not really launching any offense of my own.

Not seeing any ripostes, he pushed harder. As he came on, instead of retreating with a quick parry, I used a wide Italian lowline parry, sweeping his blade down and out with my guard while keeping my point in line with his body. I stepped into his attack as I blocked, driving my own point against his side.

‘
Touché,
’ he said, after a pause. He removed his mask. ‘Now what the hell was that?’

‘Counterparry with opposition in
tierce,
’ I replied, stepping back and returning his salute.

‘You could be really good, you know,’ he sighed as he shook my hand. ‘Your timing is dead on, your instincts are all good, but you parry too wide and hold it too long.’

‘I learned Italian style,’ I shrugged. ‘Old habits are hard to break.’ Which was true enough.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ he said. ‘Your name is Danet. Your ancestor codified French swordsmanship and you learned
Italian?
Nobody fences Italian anymore.’

‘My fencing instructor was old school,’ I replied. ‘He came from a different era.’ Again, true, but not the whole truth.

He shook his head in disbelief, ‘What am I going to do with you?’

‘Use this opportunity to learn how to stop an Italian counterparry.’ I grinned. ‘Look, I’m too old for the Olympics. I work too many hours to travel with a school team. I’m just here to play with swords. No point trying to make me a real fencer.’

I fenced a few students, just to see if ages of painfully acquired dirty tricks could still defeat the speed and strength of youth. Results were mixed. As we eventually cleaned up, I noticed a textbook in one of the students’ bags.

‘There’s a class on ancient languages here?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yeah,’ she replied. ‘Professor Deyermond teaches it. It’s really interesting.’ She lowered her eyes. ‘If you’re into that kind of thing, I guess.’

‘Where’s Professor Deyermond’s office?’ I asked.

‘At the library. You can probably still add the class, if you want. It’s not all that full.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll see about it.’

Chapter 7

I MADE MY WAY TO THE LIBRARY directly from the gym. I did shower as a courtesy, despite my eagerness to talk to somebody about the inscription on that dagger, and walked into the building with wet hair, my fencing bag over my shoulder and a sloppy, one-handed, post-shower rebandaging job on my left hand.

Behind the checkout desk sat an attractive redheaded undergrad doing her work study with a level of enthusiasm usually reserved for prison chain gangs. Her thumbs flew with blinding speed over the keypad of her cellphone. I asked her where I could find Professor Deyermond.

Without any perceptible loss of thumb speed, she looked up at me and tossed her head to indicate the rear of the building. ‘Back wall,’ she said, going the extra mile.

I thanked her and gave an ironic exaggerated bow, but it was probably wasted as she had already returned her attention to her phone. I made my way through dusty stacks to the back of the library.

This was where they kept the books nobody read. Ancient languages, philosophies and politics that had gone out of fashion, history that nobody wanted to remember; probably so they wouldn’t feel so stupid when they repeated it.

I hadn’t realized there were offices back here, but there were two brass plates screwed onto one of the doors, indicating a shared office. I could imagine a professor of ancient languages requesting such a place. They tend to be an odd bunch. Linguists who deal in current languages are generally alright, since they talk to living people. If all you study is what a handful of bureaucrats and philosophers left behind in a tongue nobody has heard in a millennium, you get a bit rusty on social interaction. I prepared myself for an elderly, pallid, bespectacled gentleman in a tweed jacket with elbow patches. The door was slightly ajar, after the fashion of doors that open onto the offices of the absentminded, so I just gave a courtesy knock and stepped through.

It was a typical shared office; a window directly across from me opening onto the pleasant rolling green of the quad; a desk facing each side wall, so nobody had a good view of either the door or the window; bookcases and posters on the walls. Cats figured heavily in the posters on the side with the unoccupied desk, as well as Mel Gibson dressed as Hamlet and Sting in a puffy shirt on the grassy courtyard of a romantic castle, apparently reading. Someone was sitting sideways to me at the other desk.

‘Excuse me,’ I began, ‘I’m looking for Professor Deyermond—’ and I stopped dead.

‘That would be me,’ came the reply.

I was right about the glasses, but that was all. Regarding me over the rims of those glasses through the most amazingly green eyes on the planet, in place of a pale, greying old man muzzily annoyed that I’d intruded on his session with Plutarch, was a breathtaking blonde in her late twenties.

To be fair, she did exhibit a few signs of absentmindedness. She was poring over two books at once, making notes in a third; she held a pen in one hand, and had another tucked behind her ear. An impressive mass of loose golden curls was rumpled from the hand she was running through it as she worked, and stray wisps trailed over her forehead. She was dressed modestly enough in the finest academic tradition: a grey cardigan over a white blouse, the top two buttons undone and the collar gaping slightly as she bent over the book. A glittering pendant on a silver chain hung down just to the top of the shadow that teasingly hinted at cleavage. Long, shapely legs emerged from a knee-length black skirt, sheathed in black stockings and ending in black, low, fairly sensible shoes.

When she saw me, and my sentence died without any sign of continuing, she raised one perfect eyebrow, took the pen she had been chewing from between her teeth and curled her lips into a smile that was warm and inviting, but had mischief in it. Her glance flicked from the fencing bag slung over my shoulder to my clumsily bandaged hand.

‘If you’re looking for books on fencing, there’s a nice copy of Talhoffer two rows back, but I can save you some time and tell you you’re probably holding the wrong end of the sword.’

At that moment, something happened. A tightness in my throat and my chest and, to be honest, my loins. I knew Dr Deyermond was probably not the most beautiful woman in the world, but that’s a hard thing to judge, especially across centuries. Cleopatra, for example, would need the services of an orthodontist if she were to vie for an emperor’s affections today, and with a six-week aerobics class and a decent salon, Lady Godiva might have set western civilization back a century with that ride of hers. That said, I couldn’t remember the last time I had been so attracted to someone.

For a man of my talents, long-term relationships don’t work. You can only stay young so long while people age around you before they start becoming suspicious, and while I could always shore up the youth of my companions, like the World’s Oldest Cat, humans never accept such things with good grace. So I’d had a fair number of lovers over the centuries; but something about this woman had my pulse racing like at no time I could remember.

I dragged my attention back to the task at hand. ‘Sorry,’ I smiled. ‘You teach a course in ancient languages?’

‘I do. I studied ancient languages and the theory of language development for a long time. How trade, travel, writing and so on affected the evolution of languages.’ She shrugged. ‘But that’s not as lucrative as it sounds, so mostly I teach English Lit. Were you looking to take a class on ancient languages? It’s only the second week of the term. I could add you.’

‘Actually, I was looking for help deciphering an old inscription. Or at least nailing down the period and region.’

Her smile remained in place, obviously hiding her disappointment that I wouldn’t be attending her class. ‘I may be able to help. Where is this inscription?’

‘It’s on a knife. An archeological find, probably a ceremonial weapon,’ I lied.

‘Where was it found?’

I was ready for this one. ‘In the ruins of a country manor in England. The family was minor gentry going back forever, long tradition of soldiering and diplomatic service, so this could have been dug up in a bog on the estate or carried back from anyplace the Brits went.’

Her smile widened. ‘Which narrows it down to...?’

‘Pretty much the whole planet,’ I admitted. ‘I can usually get at least a basic idea about languages, but this is totally new to me. I was hoping you could point me in a direction.’

‘I’ll try,’ she said. ‘Do you have a photo of the knife or a rubbing of the inscription?’

‘Nothing quite so good,’ I said, digging out my notebook. ‘I have a freehand copy.’

‘Let’s see.’ She pushed aside her books. ‘I’ve been staring at this for too long anyway. Too much epic poetry is bad for you. Almost as bad as too many romance novels.’ As I crossed the room to her desk, she stretched, uncrossing those long legs, rolling her head to ease her neck muscles and arching her back. While I’m sure this relieved the tension of sitting hunched over an obscure
Chanson de Geste,
it also showed off how white the skin of her long neck was, and how her firm breasts strained the fabric of her blouse when she moved that way.