Yarrow Read online

  Stella, he thought desperately. I need a salesclerk.

  Two miles west and slightly north of Captain Computer, Stella Sidney was studying a statistical report in her office at Tunney's Pasture and wondering, not for the first time in recent weeks, why she and Rick were still together. She sighed, trying to keep her mind on her work, but last night's argument after returning from the Ex stayed in the forefront of her mind and refused to be dislodged. It was as though they'd fallen into a downward spiral in their relationship, and the more they worked— or at least she did— at making it any better, the deeper and faster they fell.

  Surprisingly, Cat felt better after lunch. Melissa had been very supportive, and Cat realized that it was her own fear of inadequacy that had kept her from confessing her block before this. The depression that had been glooming her steps for the past few weeks was somewhat lifted, burning away like mist before the sun. If she looked hard, she could actually see the odd ragged patch of blue sky. She didn't expect to go home and pound out a hundred pages of wonderful material. But Melissa had assured her that they'd get an extension on the deadline.

  "I'll convince them to go for an autumn release," she said just before they left the restaurant. "The Borderlord should be doing well in paperback by then. Maybe we can get them to spring for a new double-headed promotion— the old paperback and the new cloth."

  That would give Cat at least another five to six months to come up with something publishable. And it removed the pressure of the deadline that had been hanging over her head. Or at least the immediacy of it.

  Standing on the sidewalk in front of Noddy's, she watched Melissa head off, then caught a glimpse of her own face on a poster in the window of Arkum Books, a couple of doors down from the restaurant. It was an ad for her latest book. "The Borderlord," the blurb read. "By the author of Yarthkin, the winner of the World Fantasy Award."

  The artist's conception of Aldon of the Borders wasn't exactly the way she'd pictured the character, but at least he hadn't been turned into a brawny barbarian hefting a sword, with some waxy-faced, impossibly-proportioned woman clutching at his leg. That had happened with the initial print run of The Sleeping Warrior. It was her first book, and when she got her author's copies and saw the cover illustration, she thought she'd die of embarrassment. For weeks she refused to go into bookstores, afraid that somehow the people browsing in them would connect her to that garish cover and judge her accordingly.

  It was Melissa who'd written a cover-approval clause into all subsequent books— quite a coup for an unknown author, as Cat had been at the time. Melissa had also managed to convince McClelland and Stewart to pick up her latest book— another coup, considering that they weren't exactly renowned as publishers of fantasy. The Borderlord was her first book to appear from a mainstream publisher. It was also her first cloth edition— if you discounted the SF book club edition of Yarthkin.

  If The Borderlord did well, it would be quite a boost to her career. The reviews that she'd seen so far were promising. If sales proved as good as Melissa thought they'd be…

  Cat sighed. If and if. The problem with The Borderlord's success, should it prove successful, was that it would put her next novel under that much closer scrutiny. And if Kothlen didn't come back soon to finish telling her the story… if he never came back… She didn't want to think about it. Besides, a successful career meant nothing compared to the loneliness she felt inside.

  She tried to recapture the optimism that Melissa had left her with. Looking away from The Borderlord poster, she glanced at the rest of the window's display.

  The man who owned Arkum Books believed in thematic displays. He had a soft sculpture dragon as a mascot whose name was Arkum as well, Arkie for short; every week it appeared in the window with a new costume that related to the current display. Today it was cookbooks, and Arkie had a tall chef's hat on his spiked head and was proudly brandishing a spatula. Last week it had been guidebooks, and Arkie had appeared in sunglasses, Hawaiian shirt and sandals, with a cheap Kodak camera slung jauntily over his shoulder.

  Maybe, Cat thought as she turned from the window, she should write a story about a window-display dragon who got fed up with his job and went off on some mad quest. Tiddy Mun would like that. Maybe if she wrote it out for him, he at least would come back.

  As Cat started for home, Farley O'Dennehy was still sleeping off last night's drunk, propped up against a tree on the heavily wooded slope between Parliament Hill and the Ottawa River. His suitcase lay on the ground beside him and he wore a tattered and stained pajama top over his clothes. He always wore pajamas when he was sleeping. Or at least as much of them as he could manage to put on before he passed out. Sometimes he even took off the clothes he was wearing first.

  Five blocks south of Parliament Hill, on the fifth floor of the L'Esplanade Laurier complex, Debbie Mitchell was typing up Bill Worthington's correspondence. Worthington was the president of Worthington Tremblay Financial Services and Debbie's boss. Worthington was also responsible for the firm's financing one third of Captain Computer at a very reasonable rate of interest. Rick Kirkby and Bill went back a long way, but where Rick jumped from enterprise to enterprise, Bill had simply stuck it out with his partner Emile Tremblay, building up their business until it had become one of the most successful and respected financial services in the province.

  Rick's name was on Bill's appointment calendar, and Debbie wondered if he needed another loan. If he did, he was going to be disappointed, because Bill had told her just the other day that he'd put all he was going to put into Captain Computer. The friendship notwithstanding, he wasn't going to throw good money after bad. Captain Computer had to make it or break it with the assets it now had on hand.

  Well, that was between them. Debbie was looking forward to seeing Rick again. She knew he was attracted to her, and one of these days she'd take him up on his mock-serious advances. She just hoped that he'd prove to be a little less puppy dog than Andy. And a whole lot longer lasting, once he got it up.

  Ben Summerfield could feel the man's eyes on him, and was trying to decide if he was about to make a pass or what. He couldn't figure out what else the guy could want. He would have laughed the whole thing off except for the intensity of the man's clear blue gaze, which he could feel settling on him every time he turned his back. There was something almost creepy about that lingering gaze, and it had nothing to do with Ben being definitely of a heterosexual persuasion when it came to sexual partners. When he had sexual partners.

  The man appeared to be in his early thirties, with stark blond hair and a pallor to his complexion that made the sudden blue of his eyes all the more disconcerting. He was slender, though obviously physically fit. His styled hair and trendy tan suit made Ben think of British rock stars like Duran Duran's Simon Le Bon or David Bowie, circa Young Americans. If he is gay, Ben thought, why isn't he hanging around the Market or on Elgin Street?

  Ben turned away and stared at Tamson House, across the park from where he sat, determined to ignore the man he'd already dubbed as the Dude, as in Mott the Hoople's "All the Young…" He had the beginnings of a headache, and the pressure of that gaze on the back of his head just seemed to make it worse. He forced himself to stare at the gables and eaves of Tamson House and counted out a minute while following the lazy flight of a crow as it flew the length of the block-long building.

  …a thousand-and-forty-two, a thousand-and-forty-three…

  He could feel the pressure ease between his temples. The hairs at the nape of his neck laid down, one by one.

  …a thousand-and-sixty.

  He turned then, but the Dude was gone.

  Vibed him out, Ben thought. He looked up and down the path that ran the length of the park, trying to pick out the man's lean figure, but couldn't find him. Fast walker. He rubbed at his temples. The headache was still there, threatening, but not quite so ready to make its appearance. Ben returned to the book he'd been reading before he'd dozed off.

  Ben was a big,
easy-going man— good-looking, despite the thinning hair up top and the extra weight he was putting on around the middle. The latter came from sitting around in his cab too much— he'd been driving one for five or six years now— and not getting enough exercise when he wasn't working. Like a cowboy and his horse, he never walked when he could drive his cab.

  He had a basement apartment in a big old house that was the last building before the wedge of Central Park east of Bank Street cut across Clemow Avenue. Due to the incline on which the house was built, the back of his apartment overlooked the park as though it were on the ground floor. He had a private entrance on the side of the house and a back door that opened onto a small yard that merged with the common. Because of that he considered the whole park his backyard, and only grudgingly allowed that the other people using it had as much right to be there as he did. He liked it best on weekdays, when the most you got were mothers pushing their new-borns around in strollers, or late at night, when you rarely met anyone.

  The book he was reading was a first edition of The Border-lord by Caitlin Midhir— he always pronounced her name carefully, Kate-lynn Meere, because he'd read in an interview somewhere how tiresome she found it being referred to as Kathlin Mid-here and all the permutations thereof. He was about a third of the way through, and as enthralled with it as he'd been with her previous four. He had the paperback and one book club edition of all her books, as well as the initial appearances of all the stories that had been collected in Grindylow and Other Stories, including "How Tod-Lowery Met the Moon," which had appeared in an obscure small press magazine called Space & Time that was published out of New York.

  He wasn't exactly sure what it was that drew him to her writing. He read a lot of fantasy— from the classics by William Morris and Lord Dunsany, straight through to newer writers like Patricia McKillip and Parke Godwin— but no one else seemed to have the same touch of rightness about their tales. It was as though she didn't so much write the stories as relate histories that, while they might not be relevant to this here and now, were true somewhere. Or somewhen.

  He knew she lived in Ottawa and had a mixed desire/fear of meeting her. While he thought— fantasized— that they'd get along famously, in reality he knew it would probably be awkward at best. What did you say to someone like her, that she hadn't heard a zillion times before? That was the trouble with famous people. They had people coming on to them all the time, wanting this, taking that. Not to mention the weirdos. He wondered if the Dude read her books, and smiled.

  No, the way he imagined it should go was, they would meet casually somewhere, get to know each other like ordinary people did and completely bypass the whole fan/admiration shtick. Once they knew each other a bit better, he could profess his admiration of her work, friend to friend.

  Ben sighed. The Borderlord lay closed on his lap. Cat's face looking up at him from the photo on the back of the dust jacket. She'd trapped him with her first book. He'd passed on it when it first came out because the cover made it look like one more thud and blunder imitation of Robert E. Howard's Conan. But then Peter had recommended it to him. Two pages into it and he'd been hooked enough to go out and buy her second book, Cloak and Hood, which had just come out. A few months following that he'd run across one of the rare interviews with her in the then-current issue of Fantasy Newsletter, and that had been the start of his infatuation.

  He'd been delighted with the personality that came through in the interview, even more delighted with the photo that had accompanied the text. Her features had haunted his dreams— a curious combination of frailty and strength that made him yearn to protect and be protected.

  The whole thing was adolescent in its intensity, and he knew it, but couldn't stop himself. Peter teased him endlessly, never failing to remark when she'd been in to buy a few books, until Ben was nervous about going into the store on the off chance that she'd be there. He'd seen her on the streets from time to time— mostly in the Glebe where Peter's store was, or in Ottawa South, where he knew she lived— but that wasn't quite the same as being in the same room as her.

  He knew she was shy. That came out in both the interviews and from what Peter had told him. But he'd bet she wasn't as shy as he was.

  Ben looked away from the photo and watched the birds above Tamson House once again. Another pair of crows had joined the first one. He was mildly envious of Peter's casual relationship with Cat. Peter had her sign a copy of Yarthkin for him, and had offered to get her to sign The Borderlord, but Ben couldn't wait to read the latter. Peter had also said more than once that he'd introduce Ben to her, but it just wasn't the way Ben wanted it to happen. If it ever did.

  He returned to the book, but his headache was starting to intrude too much for him to concentrate properly. He thought about the Dude and wondered again if the guy'd been thinking of coming on to him. It was funny. He'd been having a pleasant dream before the weight of that intent gaze had woken him, but he couldn't remember any of it now. All he had inside was a drained feeling. Probably too much sun.

  It was hot and humid— the last couple of days of August. He wore a pair of cutoff jeans and a loose cotton shirt that he'd bought at the Lung Mei sale last year— an annual three-day flogging of Indian styled tie-pants, wraparound skirts, shirts and the like— but even that was wearing too much.

  Stripping off the shut, he gathered it up with his book and started off across the common for home. He'd lie down for a while, sleep the headache away. Maybe he could plug back into the dream that the Dude had interrupted with his creepy stare.

  As Ben went in through the back door of his apartment and Cat was just arriving home, May Featherston, the landlady of the senior citizens' rooming house where Albert Cousins lived, was telephoning the police. She was a widow of fifty-three, a bustling, rounded woman who loved to fuss over her tenants. She owned the house outright, and the rents she charged, while ridiculously low compared to the present level of rental rates, still brought in enough to keep the building financially solvent.

  She dabbed at her eye with a Kleenex and tried not to think of Albert's lifeless gaze staring up at the ceiling of his room. Her finger trembled as she dialed the number— written on a piece of cardboard tacked to the wall above the phone, right under the one for an ambulance service and above the one for the fire department.

  She loved old people and knew if she was going to continue to run a rooming house for them, she was going to have to get used to the fact that they weren't necessarily going to be long-term residents. But the day that she didn't mourn the passing of such a sweet old man as Albert was the day she'd hand in her right to be a human being.

  The ringing stopped at the other end and a voice came on the line. "Police. Can I help you?"

  May cleared her throat, then calmly and slowly, began to speak into the receiver.

  5

  That Night

  Peter looked up from the copy of Jack Vance's The Dying Earth he was rereading. A vague premonition stirred in him, charging the hairs at the nape of his neck. He set the book on his lap, Liane's flight from Chun the Unavoidable forgotten. His gaze went around his living room, then riveted on the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf across from him. For a moment he thought he'd seen something… a movement….

  A book leapt from the shelf and hit the floor with a loud slap.

  Peter sat transfixed, staring at it. After a long moment he got up from his chair, moving slowly, as though in a somnam-bulant trance, and knelt by the book. It was Cat Midhir's The Sleeping Warrior. A shiver passed through him as he picked the book up, gaze locked on its garish cover. He weighed the book in his hand, then looked around the room as though something in it held an explanation for the strange phenomenon he had just seen.

  Anyone working in a bookstore was used to a book falling from its shelf for no good reason. But this one hadn't been faced cover out, as those usually were. It had been sitting with only the spine visible, and had seemed to jump right off the bookshelf. Weird. He replaced the volume, half
expecting it to come alive in his hands. The book fit snugly back into place.

  It just fell, Peter told himself. It must have been hanging over the edge of the shelf or something and just fallen off. Funny how it had happened though. From where he'd been sitting, it looked like it had just lunged off the shelf of its own accord.

  He returned to his chair and picked up The Dying Earth once more. From time to time he glanced at the bookshelf, but the books, row on row of multicolored spines, never moved.

  After wasting the better part of the evening sitting through an endless string of boring sitcoms, Cat forced herself to go up to her study and read through the whole rough draft of The Moon in a Silver Cup manuscript. As she read, she kept Melissa's comments in mind and saw that there was more than a little truth to them. The story was as much hers as Kothlen's. The bare bones of the novel belonged to her absent Other world ghost, but she was the one who'd fleshed them out.

  She took her time going over it, scrutinizing the pages word by word, looking for which parts were hers and which his. When it came right down to it, she'd taken more than a few liberties. The overall story was the same as the one Kothlen had told her, but here, where Haren met the Gypsies before he reached the keep— that was hers. And there— the whole segment with Kinneally in the tower. In fact the theme of the trickster as it touched the book, while a basic folk motif and nothing new, was entirely hers.

  Kothlen had given her the what-would-happens, but nothing of the characters' motivations; the basic plot, but not the play-by-play action. The mood was hers. The pacing and thrust.

  Okay. So Melissa was right in that regard. She was capable of dealing with the actual craft herself. So, while she couldn't finish The Moon in a Silver Cup, at least not yet, there was nothing stopping her from beginning a new novel. Nothing except a lack of something to write about in the first place. The novel had to have a reason to exist. Just following a story from A to B wasn't enough. At least not for her.