A Few Good Men Read online

  Perhaps fifteen years really had played havoc with my memory. Perhaps, just before I was arrested we’d decided to change the garbing of the lair, and I’d forgotten that in the rush of events afterwards. In the pocket of my suit were two of the disposable links I didn’t remember buying, but which—button-sized and cheaply made—I might very well have.

  The broom was right. I mean, it was my broom. Not only was it a polished silver Gryphon 500, but it had carved on it, painstakingly, the words I’d decided were my motto. No One Can Jail a Free Man.

  I winced at them. Well. I’d found out better, hadn’t I?

  Fully attired, oxygen on my back, I went to the terrace, and took off from it. I went through the usual maneuvers I’d used when I was leaving the house, in case my father had set people to watch for my leaving, then laughed, hollowly, because if there were guards ready to prevent me from leaving, I could simply wave them away.

  It wasn’t until I was headed to Andalus Seacity that it occurred to me that I could simply have taken a flying car and perhaps a retinue, to visit Javier. This being a Good Man thing was going to take getting used to.

  Andalus was relatively close to us, in a southwesterly direction. All of two hours away as the broom flew, which was one of the reasons that Javier and I had become friends when we’d both started using brooms, in defiance of our parents. We’d first met in Liberte, both of us trying to pose as commoners and failing miserably. I no longer remembered why, but, at all of fourteen, we’d got into some sort of disagreement that ended with both of us locked in a punching match. We’d been friends ever since.

  While flying, I found myself once more admiring the landscape: the sea under me, the sky above me, the smoothness of the broom’s flight.

  The feeling that I would float up into the blue seemed to be gone, and this was good. It left me able to enjoy the freedom and to think. Not much seemed to have changed since I’d been arrested. No new seacities, and the coastal areas of the continents which I’d seen so far seemed about as populated as they’d ever been. Even the music I’d heard in the diner this morning was the same type of music, if not the same music, that had been played when I’d left.

  Perhaps it is one of the illusions of youth that everything is new and constantly regenerating. Fifteen years seemed to have made almost no difference. Except for me.

  Andalus looked as it had. I don’t know if it’s cultural—a part of the northern European culture, as opposed to the southern—to build in a more orderly form. Not that Andalus was exclusively Spanish or even Southern European. It was, in fact, one of the seacities where Glaish had evolved, first as a trade language and later as an official tongue. One of the seacities from where it had reached out to become the lingua franca of Earth.

  If I remembered—and I barely did—it had started as a businessmen haven and attracted Spaniards and Mexicans, and people from all over South America, and refugees from the British Commonwealth diaspora, the speakers of English and Spanish being equally balanced.

  But the building style was all Mediterranean, all Southern European. It looked like houses were built at every angle and in positions where no one sane would have built a house. The island was crowded and, in the light of day, presented a panorama of white and various Earth tones, slashed here and there by an unexpected green or vivid blue building.

  The Good Man’s residence was at the top and looked like late-stage obsession with Rome, as it tends to strike in civilizations as different as Renaissance old Europe, the classical US and twenty-second-century Syracuse Seacity.

  There were columns. Columns and terraces, most of them not doing anything in particular except being columns and terraces, each gesturing at itself and screaming, look at me, I’m neo-Roman. Surely that means I’m the home of an enlightened ruler.

  I frowned at the palace, remembering how to go around back, and duck beneath the columns on the left, and knock on Javier’s window. But I couldn’t remember if Javier’s house, like mine, played musical rooms when a ruler died and the other succeeded. I might find Javier in that room. Or I might find an infant son of his, and what an alarm that would cause.

  I remembered, vaguely, the plan of the house. His father’s office had been at the back, facing the southeastern terraces. Which meant . . .

  Well, like most Good Men, he had a private office and, in his case, a private terrace. That meant that I could accost him. Oh, he might have a secretary or two who went in and out of his office, but people in that kind of position weren’t chatty and knew better than to spread rumors.

  Not that my return was a rumor, or that it wouldn’t be well known in no time, but I’d prefer if it didn’t get divulged in this manner. And I’d prefer if it wasn’t rumored I’d come to Javier for advice. Though arguably, that was exactly what I was doing. But Good Men are like wild animals: Any sign of weakness from one of them will cause the others to take immediate advantage.

  Given my legal position, I could imagine what Nathaniel Remy would have to say to my displaying my metaphorical soft underbelly to another Good Man.

  I landed on the terrace. I was fairly sure that Javier would be in his office at this time of day. And if he weren’t, then he would come there soon.

  His office had glass doors, though there were curtains on the inside that could be closed, they weren’t. Through them, I could see Javier sitting at the desk, and I felt a sudden wave of relief. Something—I wasn’t sure what—had made me feel as if all my friends had vanished, as though I were now a stranger to everyone, the only one of my crowd left.

  But Javier looked much as he had. He was turned sideways to me, looking at a reader on his knees.

  He was, as he had been, a small man and as slim as Nathaniel Remy, though of course on a much smaller scale. Olive-skinned with startlingly hazel eyes, he’d been a favorite with all the women in the hangouts my broomer lair had frequented. And he’d been surprisingly good in a fight. So good, in fact, that my larger size had given me very little advantage in our one and only dustup.

  The rest of his office looked empty, and the door was locked. I knocked at the door.

  He looked up, then jumped. I never saw him open the drawer, but there was a gun in his hand, and he was standing, facing me.

  “Easy,” I said. “It’s me, Lucius.”

  He stared at me, the burner firmly pointed at my midsection. If he fired, it was going to make far more of a mess than that, because it would go straight at the glass, first. Depending on how that glass had been made, it could do anything from melt to burst outward and fly at me in shards. “Don’t be stupid, Javier. It’s Lucius Keeva.”

  His mouth opened, then closed. Then he frowned, and came to open the door for me. He pocketed the gun. He looked me up and down and frowned. “So, that’s how it is, is it?” he said. “You escaped after all. We wondered at your being caught so easily.”

  “I didn’t escape,” I said, puzzled. Did he imagine I’d spent the last fifteen years living rough, like some sort of twenty-fifth-century Robin Hood? Maybe he did. Now that I thought of it. Never-Never was a secret prison for a reason. “Well, not until yesterday.”

  He frowned at me. Then shook his head, as though what I’d said was completely nonsensical. “Just as well,” he said. “I don’t mind telling you that the idea that the Sons of Liberty could penetrate into your house and kidnap you like that had me in a bit of a worry. Not to mention, of course, that I didn’t want you dead.” Those last words seemed weirdly perfunctory and caught my attention so much—did Javier want me dead? In the name of all that was holy, why?—that it took me a moment to realize the weirdness of what he’d said before.

  Sons of Liberty? The same people who’d kidnaped Max and killed him? Was he confusing me with Max? Was something wrong with his mind?

  No, wait, perhaps that was the cover story that people had been given. I’d always assumed my condemnation, and later Ben’s death, had been public, the subject of holos and sensies. But perhaps not. Perhaps it had all be so
fast and so odd because they couldn’t risk making it public. And perhaps the cover story had involved the Sons of Liberty, though I didn’t even remember hearing of them at the time.

  Perhaps, I thought with sudden alarm, the Sons of Liberty were a made-up group, used to disguise executions the Good Men committed but couldn’t admit to. It would certainly explain things better than the odd idea that they were the armed branch of the Usaians who had never before showed a tendency to do more than pray and hope for a Messiah to lead them to their long-destroyed continent.

  I tried to formulate a response, cautious enough that Javier wouldn’t think that I had lost my mind, but which would lay the groundwork to explaining the truth to him. Only I never got to, because he was looking at me, and grinning. “Some body you got yourself,” he said. “Couldn’t something have been done about that scar? You look scary enough. And I suppose none of the side effects have manifested, or has there not been time for it to show one way or the other? And how could you have got it done in two days? I thought the quickest time to do it we’d found so far was two weeks. What is it? New nanites? New drugs? And how was it done? Why? Wasn’t the last one just fine? You looked fine last month.”

  I felt like I had been caught in some sort of weird parallel universe where I couldn’t understand what people said. Maybe it was true that I’d forgotten how conversations happened. Most of what Javier had said seemed like gibberish with no referent.

  I looked around the office, which looked exactly like it had when Javier’s father used it. I’d been there once or twice, with my father, for some sort of official, documented meeting.

  Like my father, Javier’s father liked heavy dark furniture, though I suspected his was antique furniture. I had a vague memory of his saying that his desk had belonged to the king of Spain. He hadn’t said which, as though there had been only one. On a corner of that huge, dark desk, was a vast globe done in stone inlays. It didn’t show the seacities, which meant it was very old.

  On the wall was a portrait of a man who looked much like Javier, if Javier took to wearing a pointy beard and Renaissance garb. That man had a toy ship in his hands and his foot resting on a globe that looked uncommonly like that one.

  I remembered when I’d been in that office before, I’d thought that a globe made for a damn silly foot rest, and wondered why someone who looked like a Renaissance nobleman couldn’t have afforded something cushier. Now I knew better. Those gems, furnished to me over the fifteen years of my captivity, had done more than keep me sane. They’d taught me history and art and other things that were not really taught anymore, or not in any depth. That globe symbolized dominion over the world.

  I turned back to Javier, who had sat back at his desk and was gazing at me with the sort of contemplative expression of a man looking at wild beast, fresh captured. “I am going to need your help, Javier. I’m going to need your help to figure out this thing.”

  “Eh?” He said, puzzled. “What thing?”

  “How to . . . what to do as Good Man. How it all works. You must know my father gave me no instruction.”

  I saw his face change. I saw him open his drawer. Don’t ask me how I knew what he was doing. I did. It made no sense but I did. Before he’d got the drawer open, I had his wrist in my hand, then his other wrist, as he tried to reach for what looked like a paperweight on the desk, and which was in fact either a paperweight or perhaps a call button for security.

  And then I got the shock of my life. That up close, looking at Javier’s face, I’d swear that those weren’t his eyes. The color in them was the same. The shape was the same. I can’t explain what I mean, but they weren’t Javier’s eyes, all the same. Whatever was looking at me through them wasn’t Javier.

  And whatever was looking at me through them was also making a determined effort to fight me, even with both his hands held in mine. He lifted his knee, and I sidestepped, and he kicked out at air, and he tried to bite my nose off.

  “Damn you,” he said. “Damn you. It’s you, isn’t it? What are you? Impossible to kill? We told Dante to finish you off. We told him.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but I didn’t have time to argue it. I was in his office. That meant, by definition, we were surrounded by his men. And there was naked hatred in his eyes, and I didn’t know who or what he was, but he wasn’t my friend Javier. There was neither refuge nor protection here. There was neither advice nor affection, not even the consolation of talking to someone else who had been friends with Ben. What there was instead was danger.

  The moment I let go of him, he would call his security, if he didn’t just get a burner and try to kill me. The alternative was I killed him, but every sense rebelled at the idea. I couldn’t kill Javier, even if he’d gone insane.

  I transferred both his hands to one of mine. Easier said than done, while he squirmed and fought, but I was bigger, and I was much stronger than I’d been when I’d last seen him. With one hand, I unclipped my broom. There are ways to hit a man that won’t kill him. I’d have to try really hard for one of those, as out of practice as I was.

  As the broom hit him, I thought nothing had happened. He opened his mouth as though to scream, and I let go of his hands to clamp my hand over his mouth. But then he convulsed and went still. Was he dead? I couldn’t stop to see. I was in danger. Someone could come in any minute, and how would I explain this?

  I grabbed my broom, went to the terrace, and took off. I was well away from the island when I realized I should have called for help. After all, I was now a Good Man. Who would try to stop me, if I said Javier had had a stroke, or something.

  But then, when Javier woke up he would accuse me of . . . what? Being impossible to kill? Javier had tried to kill me? I felt like someone had pulled the rug out from under my feet. I might not have trusted him as implicitly and as wordlessly as I trusted Hans, but I had trusted him nonetheless.

  What insane world had I escaped to? Perhaps it would have been better if I had drowned in my jail cell after all.

  The World Turned Upside Down

  Some instinct, some feeling, prevented me going home at once. No, I don’t know what except thinking that Javier might have woken up, and if he woke up, he would try to send people to intercept me on the way to Olympus. He would assume I would return there, right?

  So instead, I took a detour, and went to Liberte Seacity, where I landed on a deserted beach.

  I’d had some time to think, and thought the best thing I could do was to talk to some of my other old friends. Perhaps they could explain what was happening, and perhaps they could tell me what had happened to Javier and why he spoke that way. Perhaps it was a stroke, I thought. In which case, my hitting him on the head could have done no good at all. But I didn’t see how I could have got around it. I couldn’t even find the stuff I needed to bind him, could I? There hadn’t been anything I could use nearby. And to let go of him and go in search of it, I’d have needed to knock him out first, anyway.

  No, I’d done the only thing I could, even if the violence of it bothered me. I didn’t want to fight and I didn’t want to hurt anyone. There had been enough of that, and anything that required me to do more of it, made me feel tired and old. Very old.

  So I landed and took the portable links out. One of them had a series of programmed numbers, but I recognized none of them, so I took the other and dialed another of the Hellions—Josia Bruno, from New Verona Seacity. It took a while for him to answer because, I supposed that was his private number, and he was the Good Man, now. The face I got, floating midair, looked like Josia well enough. I’d chosen a deserted beach well, because landing in a broom was not strictly legal, but also so I could have sight as well as sound. But he didn’t look like he recognized me at all. Which I couldn’t blame him for, I supposed. I wouldn’t have recognized myself either. “Jos?” I said. “It’s Lucius.”

  “It’s who?” he said.

  “Lucius Keeva,” I said.

  He blinked. “You mean . . .” he
said. And then frowned. “Dante?”

  Don’t ask me to explain it, please, but his expressions were all wrong. And what he said was all wrong. I pressed the phone off and took a deep breath.

  Perhaps I was the one who had gone crazy. Perhaps I had gone completely around the bend and just hadn’t realized it. Perhaps . . .

  On a whim, on a desperate moment of insanity, I dialed Hans’s number. It rang and I reached for the turn off button, because who would have it, except maybe someone new who had been assigned it? Or the person who had inherited from his father—his brother? I had a vague memory that he had one, the only other of my friends who had had a brother, though in his case we all thought it was double insurance because his father was so old. He wanted to make sure that the line didn’t die out.

  “Hello?” The face that appeared midair looked exactly like Hans, but there was no doubt it wasn’t him. I’d seen Hans dead.

  “Hans?” I said, anyway, for lack of anything else to call this face.

  “What? Jan. Jan Rainer. And you are . . . ?” His eyes widened suddenly. “It can’t be!” he said.

  “My name is Lucius Dante Maximilian Keeva, and I didn’t kill your brother,” I said. And in the annals of stupid things to say, that might take the cake.

  The face hesitated, and I thought he was going to call me a murderer or threaten me with the law or something equally bombastic. But, proving once more that nothing would go as I expected today, instead he frowned, but in the way of a man who is thinking desperately through something. “Of course you didn’t,” he said. “Don’t be ridiculous. But . . . how did you escape the execution? And where have you been these . . . fifteen years?”

  “Never-Never,” I said. It didn’t even occur to me to lie. “Well, Never-Never for fourteen years, another jail for one.”

  He blinked. “Oh. And you escaped in the breakout?” he asked. “It’s almost too . . . Have you gone home yet? To Olympus.”