Chapter Text
2005
The unmistakable sound of shattering glass jolted Walter Strickler from his reverie and he glanced down, taking in a ruined jar of marmalade at his feet and a small boy with wide, blue eyes.
At half-past-eight on a Thursday evening -- with seven essays on the effects of the Counter-Reformation still requiring rigorous comparison with their corresponding Wikipedia articles, a Soviet-era transmission referencing an unusual rare-earth rock only partially decrypted, and nothing in his cupboards resembling food except for a tube of soda crackers and a tin of beans -- it had become necessary to sally forth onto Arcadia's main drag in the vague hope that he wouldn't give up and order takeout again (centuries of acclimation to a human diet would not allow his palate the easy out of a stray cat or moldy linens any longer).
The boy at was frozen in the act of picking up the glass. He was runty, barely out of his toddler years, and thin, with a mop of unruly dark hair framing two huge, bright eyes whose expression was oddly unreadable.
"Don't tell Mom," the boy whispered conspiratorially, prompting Walter's attention to shift to the only other occupant of the canned goods isle: a woman, young, mid-twenties, knuckles visibly white around the handle of her grocery cart even from here, as were dark circles under her eyes. She was staring at a box of macaroni with the unmistakable ferocity of someone about to start crying at the slightest provocation.
Walter had been vaguely aware of the two of them entering the store just as he had; the boy trying desperately to help his mother pick out a cart, find a coupon book, and grab material from the lower shelves. It had seemed like fairly ordinary childish enthusiasm at the time, and he had discounted it.
Now he glanced back at the child -- still trying to pick up the glass from the floor -- and quietly removed a handkerchief from his back pocket. "Now, now; don't touch that. We'll sweep this to one side so no one treads on it, and then I'll find someone who works here to mop it up. I wonder," he surreptitiously glanced at the woman, whose fixed gaze bespoke a weariness years in the making, "if you might watch my cart for me while I do so?"
"Okay."
"And don't touch the glass, mind."
"I know," the boy said with the irritation of the very young who have grasped the concept being reiterated. Walter spared him a smile for that.
Two minutes later, Walter returned to an empty aisle, his cart abandoned. He thought nothing of it until a hand tugged his pant leg over in the produce section.
"I tried to watch but Mom said we had to get hot dogs."
"I understand."
"I didn't see nobody take anything." The boy's expression was intensely, frighteningly earnest. "Is my mom in trouble?"
Walter glanced down again, perplexed. "Why would she be?"
"Because I spilled the orange stuff." The boy rubbed hands - still residually sticky - on the front of his shirt. "I didn't mean to."
"Good heavens, no. Don't worry about it." Walter carefully selected a cabbage and set it between the cans of smoked oysters and apricot preserves in his cart. "Everyone drops a jar now and again; stores expect that sort of thing. Anyway, they'll just bill me, if anything."
His companion picked up a rutabaga and began poking its skin. "Why?"
"Because I told them that I dropped the jar."
The boy's eyes widened, then narrowed. "That's lying."
"Ye-es," drawled Walter, momentarily nonplussed by the intensity of the child's disapproval, "but I think the real issue is that someone assumes responsibility, don't you?"
"Jim, come here," said a woman's voice, so subdued, and Walter cursed his choice of words. "Leave the nice man alone."
"Actually," he heard himself saying, "if it's not too much trouble, could you please grab me a bag of croutons? Those ones down there? I can't bend that low." The boy (Jim? strange name for this generational cohort) glanced in the direction of his pointed finger and gamely darted off.
In this way, Walter allowed himself to become a secondhand babysitter for the next twenty-odd minutes. Centuries of practice enabled him to radiate the perfect aura of non-patronizing interest and amused reserve necessary to keep the boy preoccupied while his mother gathered her groceries (and her resolve) as their paths led them inexorably through the store.
"I'm gonna be five," the boy informed him solemnly, putting the wrong kind of lightbulbs into Walter's cart. "In -- six days?" He glanced over at his mother, who nodded.
"Many happy returns."
"I'm gonna get a bike and my dad is gonna help me ride it," the boy added; Walter observed the almost-imperceptible tightening of the woman's shoulders. "Mom says I gotta wear a helmet."
"I agree. You can come to considerable harm without one. I expect you'll have training wheels?"
An expression of trepidation flitted onto the boy's face. "Dad says they're for babies." His tone indicated he wasn't sure what he felt about this. "He says you don't need them."
"It's one way to learn," Walter conceded. "Mind you, sometimes training wheels help you to find your balance faster than just trying it on your own. I'm sure you'll be good at it, either way."
The child looked at him with a sudden intensity. "I don't fall down." He abruptly ran down the length of the toiletries aisle while Walter surreptitiously switched out the bulbs for the ones with the correct wattage. Moments later, the unmistakable sound of small tennis shoes thudded back and something collided with his cart. "See? I didn't fall down." He pointed at a bag of epsom salts in Walter's cart. "What's that?"
"It's for baths."
"I hate baths."
"Ah, but you're young. A warm bath is one of the few consolations of old age."
The boy squinted at the package. "S - salt?"
"Why -- yes. You can read?" Remarkable.
"Salt doesn't go in baths," his companion said severely. His mother intervened.
"It's good for your muscles, Jim. Now please -- can you go get Gran-Gran's special pants for me? The purple bag?" Jim gamely thundered back down the aisle to peer at the adult incontinence section, leaving the woman and Walter alone once more.
He half-turned to deliver a particularly crisp bon mot about youth and internal vitality, but the sight of her red-rimmed eyes killed it in his throat. The effect was intensified by the profound depths of her irises, deep blue enhancing the contrast that much more against the signs of obvious distress. Their gazes locked with the sudden graceless horror of those who observe pain and those observed in pain. Some unasked-for New Wave song started playing on the store's P.A. system.
"I think he put a turnip in your cart," the woman said at length, tone low. Her hair was red. Somehow he hadn't noticed that before.
"Rutabaga," Walter acknowledged.
"I'm so sorry."
"It's all right. I need the fiber -- "
"I'm so sorry," she repeated as though she hadn't heard him. "I -"
Jim jumped onto the cart, waving pantiliners above his head. "These ones, right?"
"Yes, sweetie," his mother responded, and Walter felt relieved by the break from her trapped stare, but even more so by the tenderness returning to her voice. "Good work! Now, can you take this -" she liberated the rutabaga from Walter's cart and placed it into the boy's hands "- and put it back where you found it?"
Pragmatist that he was, Walter used the ensuing confusion about where root vegetables belonged to slink towards the front of the store, forgoing the next three items on his list. The sudden lapse in conversation was replaced by a heightened awareness of the background music interspersed with some idiot in the parking lot leaning into his car's horn.
Those who came before me / Lived through their vocations . . .
Halfway through being rung up (the cashiers never remembered the price of cabbage nor believed Walter when he insisted it wasn't lettuce), his companions resurfaced at the adjourning register. Their cart, he noticed, was full of store generics with corresponding coupons paperclipped to their surfaces. A dyspeptic cashier scowled as Jim -- Atlas in miniature -- struggled to heave a sack of potatoes as big as himself onto the conveyor belt.
"That reminds me," dissembled Walter, "I may have knocked over a jar -- "
A fresh round of honking drew all attention to the lot, where a man in a blue station wagon was venting his spleen against the world despite being fully parked. Intuition made Walter shoot another sidelong glance at Jim's mother, and his suspicions were confirmed -- but her expression was not one he expected. No fear, no guardedness, no panic; merely contempt. Infinite weariness, and contempt.
For another excruciating moment, her gaze caught his own and the sorrow returned to them. They asked for nothing, those eyes, not even for recognition of her misery, and certainly not for anyone's pity. Walter ducked his head and began counting out his change.
I see a ship in the harbour / I can and shall obey . . .
He snuck a glance at the occupant of the station wagon as he walked out to the lot: dark hair, unusually bright eyes -- except for the petulant scowl and five o'clock shadow, Jim might've been a carbon copy of the man. It did not please Walter to observe the woman and her son receiving no help from him with loading the groceries into the back of the car, and perhaps that was what prompted his decision to slow down at the cart return station.
"How old are you?" the boy asked, trying and failing to wheel his cart into the corral. Walter carefully swung the edge into alignment for him.
"Oh, I don't do the math anymore. Frightfully old."
"How old?"
"Well, I have reason to believe Diocletian was Emperor when I was your age, but we were provincials, putting it mildly. Not yet two thousand years old; I feel comfortable saying that."
"A hundred?"
"Several."
"Seven hundred?"
"In any case," concluded Walter, "congratulations on your upcoming birthday. I hope your bicycle adventures will be safe ones." He smiled again. "Though I have it on good authority that you don't fall down." The boy blinked, then suddenly bestowed a radiant, open-faced grin upon him; it was the most winsome thing Walter had seen in years.
The child scampered back to his mother, and Stricklander returned to the work of ending the world.
2005 (later)
"Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind?" Walter grimaced as the picture on the screen developed artifacts, audio and video rapidly falling out of sync with each other. "Otto? For god's sake -- "
A disjointed if familiar giggle emerged from his laptop speakers, complemented by a smear of light across round spectacles. "'Mein Vater, mein Vater, und hörest du nicht, was Erlenkönig mir leise verspricht?'"
"Barely. I'm astounded you managed to get a signal at all." Walter leaned back in his chair, glancing behind the desk at the world map with its carefully-distributed pinpoints. "How are Ur and Lagash treating you?"
Another high-pitched giggle. "I would not have called without reason, mein Freund, as you know." Something blackened and indistinct moved into view of the camera, albeit choppily, and the next two minutes were spent interrupting each other as the feed kept cutting out. In spite of the Janus Order's extensive and subtle infiltration into the military and various contracting firms long before this current war began, an encrypted video channel capable of showing anything worth looking at was apparently still a dream beyond a dream.
" -- looks analogous to Section 7a, possibly the inner column. No data -- "
Walter growled in frustration as the signal cut out again, and his stomach echoed the sound. The thought of his groceries sitting in the back of the car surfaced and he berated himself for not succumbing to his worse impulses; if he'd been a little less abstemious, he'd have eaten by the time he received Otto's call . . .
"Just send it -- Otto? Send it here, with the other samples. It's the only way to be sure." He held up a hand at the other Changeling's protestations. "And don't go through the usual channels; they're finally cracking down on looters. I'm still determining where the last shipment ended up." He delivered a particularly pointed glare at where he thought Otto's face had been in the last ten seconds. "I shouldn't want to explain that to our esteemed supervisor."
The signal grew choppy again. " -- ere is he?"
"Oh, still in Siberia. Decimating the native antelope herds, if I infer correctly." Walter spun his pen on the surface of the desk as his gaze wandered to Russia and the Post-It Note marked with a single, unmistakable rune and a question mark. "It's been quiet for a while. Either he's given his minders the slip or he's eaten them. Again. In any case, see that these stones make it here instead of languishing on some Interpol agent's desk; there's a good man."
"Ja, ja." A fragmented sigh. "Until Gunmar's Return."
"Until His Return. Tchuß, Otto."
He closed the window, and the abrupt silence was deafening. Here, alone again in the office behind his office, long after the end of the school day, with the game in the school gymnasium over hours ago and the last janitor just now locking the door . . .
Walter's hand brushed against his trouser leg and encountered something sticky: marmalade. In spite of himself, he smiled.
2005 (six months later)
It had not been what Otto had promised. Something was unusual about the stones, to be sure (why was Oligocene volcanite mixed in with Neo-Assyrian gypsum?) but it wasn't the Bridge. The consolation of some rather amusing cylinder seals did go a little way towards mitigating the sense of frustration.
That, and he'd managed to find an establishment that made a proper cuppa and had outdoor seating. With the school year over, he'd lately fallen into the bad habit of not leaving his apartment for days at a time, endlessly poring over field reports and maps until he nodded off. Teaching kept one's mind in good rhythm; once presented with the opportunity to do as he pleased, Stricklander faltered, obsessed, or idled. As such, forcing himself to work out in the world was a small step towards regaining his verve -- and yet, the sour taste of disappointment had followed him here. They'd been so sure.
Another false positive. Another dead end. Walter cursed, and took another long sip of tea.
"Excuse me. Um." A shadow fell across his notes on cuneiform. "Sorry to bug you, but -- can I just set my things down here for a minute?"
Something about the young woman seemed vaguely familiar, so he assented with a nod. A frayed messenger bag crammed with three-ring binders, textbooks, laundry, and what looked like a leaking thermos was promptly deposited on the other side of his table. He watched with detached interest as its contents were systematically removed and deposited into neat piles -- or attempts were made at this, as the slippery surfaces of the folders cascaded over each other to the ground. Walter sighed inwardly, but knelt down to retrieve them for her.
"You're the Turnip Man!"
He started, hitting his crown against the underside of the table, jostling the remainder of his tea out of its cup and down his neck. "Ack!" Gracelessly, he fell against the support column, prompting another volley of binders to fall. A disproportionate amount of these seemed to find his spine.
"Oh -- geez! Oh -- " A frantic blue gaze met his, a hand on either shoulder guiding him back into his seat. "I am so sorry, hang on, I've got a napkin or -- something -- "
You've already done quite enough, he nearly spat, but just then he recalled where he'd seen those eyes before and the penny finally dropped. "You -- you're young Jim's, er, mother, aren't you?"
"Yeah! Yes. Sorry. You remembered?" She was blotting up the tea that had spilled on his notes with what looked like a pair of hospital scrubs, tracking black ink across the surface of the paper. "Geez. I am so sorry -- "
"It was a rutabaga."
"What?"
"A rutabaga. Not a turnip." Walter shuddered slightly as the lukewarm tea beat a downwards path towards the hem of his briefs. "And please, Mrs. -- "
"Barbara. Ms. I mean, Lake. Barbara." The two elderly ladies brunching at the nearest table were giving them decidedly confused looks.
" . . . Ms. Lake," he managed, "leave those alone for now." He made an ineffectual gesture towards the ground. "Those, they'll get wet -- "
As his companion yelped and attempted to salvage her papers, Walter removed his jacket and tried to absorb the burgeoning tributary before it reached his buttocks. Torn between peevishness and concern, he watched her stack her material back onto the tabletop with slightly more success. "All present and accounted for?"
"It better be," she muttered, then flushed. "Um. Hang on -- "
-- and then her fingers were in his hair, probing, and his aching skull felt as though someone dumped the contents of an electrical storm into it. Stricklander had long prided himself on his improvisational abilities and quick-witted assessments of developing situations, but occasionally life threw one curve balls. Sometimes these took the form of a human groping you.
"You'll probably have a bump here by morning," the woman -- Lake -- said, something decidedly different in her tone, clinical yet relaxed. "Ibuprofen to make the swelling go down, or just aspirin. Cold compress should do it." She jerked his chin up as easily if she were a farrier inspecting a horse's teeth. "Show me your pupils."
Her gaze was terrifyingly direct. Sharp, clear depths of saturated lapis - no, sapphire - no, the color was too much like water, the sea - no, no, it was that very same pigment they'd used in the scriptorium, yes, the Virgin's blue -
"I've not seen that color since the thirteenth century," he heard himself saying out loud.
Her eyes narrowed. "Huh. That doesn't sound good. Did you drive here?"
"Oh -- no. No, Ms. Lake, that was just idle woolgathering. Forgive me," and he gently guided her hands away from the sides of his face, surprised by the current they generated under his fingertips. "My phrenological examination is concluded?"
This prompted an uptick in the corner of her mouth, but her manner was otherwise one of decided severity. "Hmm. Have you ever had a concussion before?"
He let go of her hands. "Rather forward of you."
"It increases your chances of getting one again," she responded, folding her arms.
"Merely funning. No," and Walter rubbed the back of his head, wincing (yes, a bump seemed likely), "and it takes far more than a tap on the head to put me out of commission." As many have learned to their great detriment, he did not add.
"You'd be surprised," she said in that oddly . . . appropriate voice. "Are you familiar with the symptoms? Is there anyone who can get you to medical treatment if you start exhibiting them?" She reached for the nearest sheet of dry paper, jotting something down with --
He lunged for his key. "NO -- not that one, if you please. It -- leaks."
If she noticed the sudden intensity of his outburst, she didn't show it, instead grabbing one of the loose ballpoint pens scattered on the table. "I'm leaving you with the number for the hospital. Give them a call if you start experiencing any of these."
Walter screwed up his eyes in consternation at the chicken-scratchings left on his translation of the cylinder seals. "Anxiety? Nausea? Emotional outbursts? These are symptoms of being alive in the twenty-first century, not concussion."
"Better safe than sorry," she retorted. "Speaking of which . . ." The smooth, collected tone drained out of her voice, as did the focus behind those singular eyes. "I -- I'm sorry about all this . . . well, all this." She coughed nervously before turning her attention to the bottom of her messenger bag.
"'Into every life, some pain must fall', or words to that effect." This won him a pursed-lipped smile. "Are you . . . looking for something in particular?"
"Now who's being forward?" she retorted. "Ah! Got 'em." She brandished a keychain in triumph. "I really should get a lanyard for these." With a sigh, she began stuffing the bag full of her books and binders, wincing as she rolled up the still-damp scrubs with their newly-acquired inkstains. "Geez. I'm really sorry about your . . . notes?"
There had been some speculative scribbling on how the stones might've been moved out of their usual strata, but nothing that betrayed the mission; if there had been anything pertaining to the Bridge, he certainly wouldn't have been so stupid to bring it out in the open. He waved a conciliatory hand. "You can't be sorry forever, Ms. Lake."
Again, the pursed-lipped smile as she ducked her head. "Here's hoping." She wrenched the heavy bag back onto her shoulder, staggering for a moment as weight was redistributed.
"Careful, young Atlas." Walter leaned back in his seat. "Don't upend the world." She flushed, red against blue. "My regards to Jim. I trust he's enjoying his bicycle?"
There was an instantaneous change in her demeanor, and suddenly she really was the same woman from the store: despairing, enduring, focused inwardly. "He . . . not exactly." Barbara Lake glanced across the street, jostling the keys in her hands (again, he noticed, white knuckles). "Um. Thanks again."
"For -- "
But she had slipped across the street to that same blue station wagon as last time. Walter watched her pull out of the parking space and thoughtfully rubbed the back of his neck, debating whether or not to order another cup of tea. His eyes fell back towards his smeared, illegible translations, and on the warning signs of neurological damage. The ballpoint pen held its own against the damp paper far better than his fountain pen had.
Instinctively, he looked for his keypen. It was not on the table.
two days later
"We don't hand out our staff's contact information," the man behind the desk said bluntly, his eyes narrowing.
"I assure you, I don't need contact information. I merely wished for confirmation that she works here -- ?"
"That won't be possible."
Walter resisted the urge to reach over the reception desk and pummel the cretin's face with the vase of wilting carnations next to the phone, instead channeling his frustration into steepled fingers. "If anything, I wanted to leave my contact information for her, seeing as she has something of mine."
"Sir, are you having a medical emergency?"
"Obviously not -- "
"Then I'm going to have to ask you to leave the premises." The man gestured at the old woman who was wheeling up behind Walter. "This is a hospital, not the Missed Connections page."
Walter shot him a look far less murderous than he felt, bestowed a markedly warmer smile upon the geriatric lady and her husband, and stalked out of the reception area of Arcadia Oaks General Hospital. Once outside, he surveyed the parking lot for a blue station wagon. He'd already checked four clinics and two nursing homes in the desperate hope that Barbara Lake might've been employed there. Nothing.
Given his penchant for redundancies and backups -- features which he had forcibly introduced to the Janus Order, over much kicking and screaming -- it was profoundly idiotic to be thwarted in such a simple way. Why hadn't he ever made a backup key? Oh, granted, Changeling-reactive selenite wasn't quarried just anywhere, and in nine hundred years of owning that particular lock and key set he'd never lost either, but now --
Walter gritted his teeth as centuries of subsumed rage threatened to erupt through his skin. A gleam of light reflecting off the windshield of a nearby car warned that his eyes were betraying him; he ran a hand over his face.
Yes, the goblins knew he was still a going concern. And yes, he'd made a point of casually emailing a few agents just to indicate that he was temporarily indisposed (and more importantly, alive and well). One week of not answering the phone -- metaphorically and literally -- might come to nothing; after that, the others would suspect that something was awry. Fragwa and the rest of his repellent brethren were already wondering why finding this woman was so important to the mission; if they discovered he'd lost access to his own office . . .
Stricklander had been deposed once before, only regaining his position due to the confluence of several highly unrepeatable circumstances, one of which had been the First World War. Once was enough.
Without access to his inner sanctum -- the nerve center of the Order's operations -- the work on the reconstruction of Killahead Bridge would slow to a crawl, just long enough for some enterprising upstart or some old rival with a grudge to sink the blade in deep. Or, he suspected, for Bular to finally get an excuse to do away with him in a much more terminal sense than last time --
Kicking his car's tire in a fit of sudden pique, Walter cursed that woman -- Barbara Lake -- and the benighted chain of events that had led her path to ever cross his. All his plots, subtleties, contrivances, all the dirty dealings and long knives, all the battlefield crises and graveyard jaunts, and what had undone him? A jar of marmalade. He should have let the little whelp bloody his fingers on the glass. Should have trodden them into it --
-- you don't really mean that --
He paused, a smattering of details falling across his mind. Her white knuckles around the cart. A ring. The feel of one absent when he'd eased those (remarkable) fingers off his scalp. Six months. The look of tired anger on her face in the store. A boy who was not enjoying his bicycle.
Of course he could find her. He knew Jim's birthday, or at least its range.
The next hour was spent combing the newspapers on record at the library (and listening to the head librarian complaining about the difficulties of digitizing everything, what's wrong with microfiche) before stumbling across a birth announcement: to James and Barbara Lake, a baby boy (8 pounds 4 ounces, good lord). Paternal grandparents were Merle and Sandra Lake (unlisted or not in town; he'd already tried all instances of Lake in the phonebook); maternal grandparents were Jacob and Evelyn Steiner.
More digging in the papers indicated that Jacob had passed away only three months prior to Walter's chance encounter with his kin in the supermarket. Evelyn was still around, with a listed address and phone number in the local directory.
The part that really made him boggle, however, was seeing that same number in the Wanted section of the current edition of the newspaper, which he was perusing as a reward for all his hard work (schadenfreude leveraged against humans was a filthy habit, but the Personals were a guilty reading pleasure, especially when he had reason to suspect that his fellow teachers were trying to be discreet about their romantic lives). Evelyn, or someone with her number, was looking for a replacement part for her washing machine.
What followed next was something of a long shot, but he'd worked miracles with less.
Missed Connections:
Turnip Man seeks Lady of the Lake. You have something of mine (besides my attention). Cup of tea? 555-8746
two days later (again)
There were seven messages on the answering machine. Three were from Otto, mostly nattering on about unusual silicate deposits and enquiring hopefully after any information that Walter had gleaned from the shipment, and had he liked the shipping name he'd used? The rest were field reports. Nothing too urgent. A normal four days.
However, there was also a missed videoconference flag on his laptop from the previous morning. Initially he dismissed it as Otto checking in, before noticing where it had originated. Heedless of the time difference, Walter redialed and waited, grimacing. He'd been in a relatively good mood an hour ago, but now he had an inkling that things were merrily speeding towards the edge of a cliff.
Seeing who picked up did little to change this. "Lord Stricklander," Nomura acknowledged with a slight bow towards the screen, the act of obeisance failing to conceal the suspicion in her bulbous, green eyes. "At last."
"Ms. Nomura," he drawled, twisting the cap on his pen. "What an unexpected surprise. Does Andrei Ignatievitch know you're scraping your claws on his precious equipment?"
Her nostrils flared, one eyelid twitching slightly. She'd never been particularly good at concealing her emotions in her trollskin, and she'd always worn her human flesh like an uninspired mask. Wasted potential. "I was summoned."
"Summoned? By whom? I don't recall --"
The camera shuddered as something seismic occurred offscreen as an indistinct dark mass moved into the frame. An obsidian-edged voice flooded the room, feedback shrieking through the speakers.
"I summoned her."
Walter forced his gaze to lock with the two baleful red orbs that now occupied the center of the screen. "Lord Bular. So good to hear from you again; how is the taiga this time of year?"
Bular ignored that. "You weren't here when I made contact. Why?"
Walter sighed, casting a world-weary look off to the side; inwardly, his mind raced. "I'm only monitoring the Trollmarket Gateway, after all."
"Answer the question."
He narrowed his eyes. "I did, rather. I'm the sole operator in this region, aside from the goblins. Sometimes, goblins fail to exercise due caution and humans notice. Sometimes, trolls notice. You must admit that the latter outcome is infinitely more dangerous to our ends?" He leaned back in his chair. "The negligent parties have been reprimanded. It merely took some time to smooth over."
One of the great difficulties in lying to Bular was that -- being naturally indisposed to believe anything his subordinates said -- one never knew just how to calibrate the scale of one's fabrications. Bular hated stealth, hated secrecy, hated Changelings in general, hated Walter in particular, and had likely been going mad from hiding for the last millennium or so. Subsequently unequipped to understand or appreciate the Order's mission in human society, his recurring solution to the problem of detection was to destroy the source and eat the corpse. Exponentially worse when multiple witnesses were involved.
The massive black troll exhaled in a thunderous snort. "I tire of your excuses, Impure."
"Tire all you like. I do your father's bidding and abide by his faith." Walter leaned forward ever so slightly. "How's your back, by the way?"
This prompted a vicious snarl. Nomura, faintly visible on the periphery of the screen, attempted to sidle even further away as she desperately interjected, "We -- there was a notification from the Moscow operatives, about Korshas -- the Bridge segments from Otto's expedition have been stolen --"
"Otto's expe -- what." Stricklander leaned even closer. "'Stolen'? By whom?"
Bular cast a murderous glare offscreen. "The Impure was careless. He attracted attention."
"Not the Trollhunter -- "
Another snort. "Human attention." A huge black fist blotted out the screen as the laptop was rotated to show the unfortunate Changeling gagged and bound to a chair, eyes swollen shut, head lolling. In spite of himself, Walter winced.
"I assume you didn't find him like that," he hazarded. "Andrei? What happened?"
Nomura leaned into the frame, her tone noticeably more relieved now that Bular's ire was focused elsewhere. "Korshas's reputation got the better of him. As far as we can tell, he insulted some bigwig or another and, well . . ." She glanced at her erstwhile associate. "Someone decided to teach him a lesson. They took everything in his apartment -- "
Walter objected. "Ignatievitch wouldn't keep anything related to the Bridge in his home; that violates at least three major operational codes -- "
"Otto sent the shipment there by his request." Nomura shrugged. "He -- Korshas -- was afraid the Mob was watching the safe house." Behind her, Bular jabbed one of his massive black blades under Andrei's chin, tilting it upwards. "Apparently this was all because he wouldn't sell some oil baron's daughter a necklace -- "
"Why on earth wouldn't you do that, Andrei Ignatievitch?"
Nomura's eyes glinted in wicked amusement. "It was part of the haul from the Venice expedition."
Walter winced. "Ah. That necklace. Hardly prudent to have cases of hysterical lycanthropy released into the general public . . . next time, Korshas, don't display baubles that humans shouldn't --"
"There will be no next time," Bular declared, and the blade slammed down.
earlier
It had been such a comparatively good day, otherwise.
He had allotted himself five to fifteen minutes for conversation with Barbara Lake, preparing to accept a plethora of apologies with as much good grace as he could muster, hopefully imbibing at least one cup of tea without wearing it. He would be civil, decorous, not in any way betraying the panic and frustration and disproportionate wrath that her absent-minded escapade had engendered in him. Above all, he would make it clear that this was the second and last time their paths would cross; he had no time for social pleasantries and this was likely to be compounded by whatever departmental nightmares awaited him in his office.
They spent over an hour talking. To be fair, he did manage the civil and decorous angle; she made it quite easy.
The waiter arrived with a second pot and the check just as Walter managed to verify his theories on where Barbara had been hiding. "You're a medical student?"
"Intern, actually." She sighed. "As of last week."
"Congratulations!" Walter extended his right hand, noting that the distinct feeling of something still emanated from the tips of her fingers; interesting. "What's your intended field of study?"
"Emergency medicine." Barbara's hand, he noticed, had small nicks and cuts on it, clean but ragged nails, and slight discoloration around the ring finger.
"Fascinating," he murmured, letting her hand go. "I had a hunch -- that is, that you were employed at the hospital in some fashion, but the gentleman at the front desk was less than forthcoming."
"Sorry about Brent," she said, idly stirring her tea in a counterclockwise motion. "He's a real guard dog. Well, he has to be -- the police department around here has some screwy ideas about getting toxicology reports without going through the right channels, plus they had some weird stalker stuff going down a few months ago . . ." She shivered.
"Quite all right, Ms. Lake. I didn't want to compromise anyone."
"Barbara." She smiled. Something about that induced him to smile back. "And -- sorry. Walter? Is it all right if I call you Walter?"
"My friends call me Walt." Perhaps they would, if this iteration of himself bothered to make them. It was odd that he was considering this angle only now. "Never Wally," he decided aloud.
"Never Barbie, and that's a deal."
He once again extended a genteel hand with a deliberately solemn expression. "Accepted." They shook, Barbara's smile quirking up higher around the edges of her mouth.
"Anyway, I'm just so glad to have found you! I was honestly freaking out as soon as I saw this thing -- " She gestured to the pen, now safely on Walter's side of the table "-- and I called the cafe twice, but they didn't know who you were." She gave him a look of mock severity. "Who still pays with cash, huh? I bet they're unmarked, nonsequential bills too?"
"I resent the implication that I have anything to hide." Walter hooked his thumbs into the lapels of his jacket. "I paid with perfectly ordinary, trackable currency, obtained through good old-fashioned securities fraud and confidence scams. How very dare you?"
Barbara guffawed, a fleck of tea beading on her lower lip. Walter was not sure why that seemed important. "Aww, I've slighted his honor! Pistols at dawn?"
"Foils, madam." He poured himself some more tea, vaguely annoyed how calm he felt in spite of the looming obstacle of getting into the office, and even more vaguely annoyed that he didn't want to think about that just now. "Bring a second, a flask, and a shovel."
"Couldn't we just have a knife fight, like civilized people?"
Oh, Barbara, Barbara. "I fear you might have me at an advantage, there. How are you at Rummikub?"
Another snort. "Anyway, I'm just glad that the washer chose this week to die -- okay, no. I'm just glad that we ended up on the same page. Literally." She raised her cup in a salute; only some of it spilled over the rim. "Otherwise, I'd never have found you. To the Classifieds Section!"
"Ah, so you're on the hunt for appliances?" He sipped his tea, the picture of innocence.
"Hmm? Oh. Yeah, uh," Barbara coughed, pushing auburn bangs out of her eyes. "It's -- we're -- I'm staying with my grandmother right now, and the washer's been there since, oh, the Eisenhower administration." She sighed. "They really knew how to make 'em back then."
"Presidents?"
"Machinery." Barbara took a sip, frowning. "But they don't do repairs on her model, anymore. And the warranty expired, so we'd be stuck with buying a new one, and that will probably break in less than ten years. So I'm looking for replacement parts."
"Planned obsolescence has much to answer for," Walter said with the barely-sublimated fury of a being who had spent the latter half of the twentieth century replacing refrigerators without knowing why. "Any luck?"
"A few leads -- but I'm blathering." She put down the cup, leaning forward over the table. "Sorry, but can I ask you what you were doing when I barged over? What those notes were about?" Barb straightened up slightly in her chair, like a shy child. "I mean, if you don't mind me asking . . ."
"Cuneiform. Tablet seals. Some poor near-Eastern merchant was complaining about his competitor's shoddy business practices -- at least, that would seem to be the gist of it." Walter rubbed the back of his neck. "Mind you, my Sumerian isn't what it used to be. Though to be fair, neither is Sumer."
Her shoulders hunched in interest. "Thought so. You're a professor?"
He smiled, a mask for a series of quick calibrations. "Too kind. No, I teach at Arcadia Oaks High School, though my field is History." He raised his cup again in acknowledgment. "Partial credit."
Barbara's eyebrows raised. "Huh. Archaeologist was my next guess."
"Oh, I once had aspirations. But that was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead."
"Shakespeare?"
"Close. Marlowe."
"Close enough for partial credit?"
"Probably; most people don't even recognize it's a quote." He sighed. "Someone's going to accuse me of murder, one of these days." Idly, he tried to remember the last time that had actually happened; the XYZ Affair? Or Burma? Or . . .
Barbara tilted her neck to drain the last of her tea. Her throat was pale, long, with carefully-delineated tendons. Structurally, it put a good few cultic reliefs of Ishtar to shame.
"Sorry," he interjected, abruptly aware that he had drifted from one reverie to another and had missed whatever she'd just said. "Could you repeat that?"
"Alibi. Give me a heads-up and I'll say you were helping me with the laundry." Barbara sighed. "On that note, I obviously had an ulterior motive for meeting you here . . ."
For a terrible split-second Walter recontextualized everything that had been said in the past hour and came to the conclusion -- no, no, she couldn't possibly think this had been a --
But Barbara had stood up and was tucking a faded ten dollar bill into the sleeve left by their server. "Good thing this place is so close to the laundromat. So . . . I've got to go, but it was really nice having . . . well. " She tucked her hair behind her ear. "Jim's smart for his age, but it's nice when conversations don't revolve around Gun Robot."
He glanced down. "Paying with cash, Ms. Lake? Tsk, tsk."
"Suspicious, isn't it?" She gently swatted his hand away as he reached for the check. "Of course, I did actually steal something from you, so there's some criminal activity right there." She shifted her over-large bag onto her shoulder once again. "I . . . suppose I might see you around?" Her smile was an unlikely juxtaposition of shy and worldly; it defied description. "Assuming, of course, you actually manage to get that concussion." She held out her hand again.
Some vague, confused set of buried principles demanded that he kiss it, but in light of the previous scare Walter managed to return a reasonably warm handshake instead. "I look forward to it. My best to Jim."
"You know, he's still trying to help people at the supermarket," Barbara remarked, smiling ruefully. "I think you awakened something in him."
"My legacy as a teacher is realized! I may die content."
"Well, except that he keeps putting what he thinks people want into their carts, and -- " She flushed, suddenly stifling a giggle. "No. Inappropriate. Thanks again, Mr. Strickler."
"Well, now I'm curious." He took a last long pull from his cup.
"I, uh, made the mistake of describing something he found in the bathroom cabinet as a balloon," she said, primly. "Unfortunately, he can read boxes, so when the nice old lady, uh, asked him for help finding party decorations, he ran to the family planning section."
Walter did not succeed in his earlier stated objective of not wearing his tea.
evening
The first love of Stricklander's life changed him completely.
His familiar had been taken from a warband somewhere in the morass of shifting borders of collapsing empires. In a time of churn and confusion and constant westward expansion, it was an easy enough adjustment from his previous experience in Gunmar's cohort: the same violence and double-dealing, but now on a much smaller scale, and on horseback.
In later years, he would take umbrage against historical views of the Visigoths as savages out of a sense of loyalty to those members of his adopted people who had cared for him (or at least never sought to kill him), and he would also realize with age and hindsight that if anything, his human family had been unusually dysfunctional by the standards of most Homo sapiens.
This notwithstanding, he had easily embraced battle and slaughter and cruelty amongst and against humanity in those younger years. Gumm-Gumm society was hierarchical, brutal, and built nothing but heaps of ruin; very little of this new society indicated that humans were much otherwise. He fought his older brothers, his cousins, other Thervingi, the people from the east who were always pushing his tribe further into Roman territory, Roman troops, and whatever trolls that he could get the drop on for many years. A rank-and-file Changeling of no status, young and green (figuratively and literally), he lived out several lives in this way, learning the blade, disappearing into other clans and Gothic nations as necessary, eventually pillaging his way into Italy under Alaric in 410.
Granted, there had been stirrings, odd swellings of new emotion that surfaced as they rode south, seeing the aqueducts, the roads, the evidence of a more massive infrastructure than anything he'd ever run across in his decades of wandering, but then he saw Her and was born anew.
She was long in the tooth, weary, dusty, a shadow of her former glory, but the sun shone on her and for a few wondrous moments Stricklander's stone heart forgot to beat.
Rome. The City.
And that had been the end of Wallia, whose name meant slaughter, and he was forever after that moment a creature of empire, for better and for worse. They'd still sacked the place, of course.
Now, nearly sixteen hundred years later, Walter found himself in another Mediterranean climate. Et in Arcadia Oaks, ego.
He leaned against the hood of his car, exhaling deeply. The sight of the town at night -- a minor galaxy radiating out of the deep folds of the valley -- never failed to calm his nerves and set his soul to rights. Not Rome, but something of the Eternal City, as every true city was a reflection of the same. Humans could innovate. They could build. They could imagine.
Trolls, by and large, couldn't. Or wouldn't.
Walter sighed and poured himself another round. At least it was summer. The last thing the remnants of his dignity needed right now was for some of his students to pull up for clandestine fornication purposes and discover their history teacher sitting on his car with a bottle of Château Rothschild and a Solo cup.
He'd spent an excruciating two hours exchanging recriminations and thinly-veiled threats with Bular after Korshas's untimely execution (for once, Walter was glad that the resolution had been sufficiently poor -- pun largely unintentional, poor Andrei). Then, in spite of his insistence that the chain of command (what was left of it) be followed, Nomura was deputized to track down the missing cargo, which would likely elicit more attention from the local authorities. Then, he'd had to reach Otto and ask some very pointed questions about why the Russian operation had received segments of the Bridge while all he'd been sent some piddling rocks and Mesopotamian receipts. The rapidly-disintegrating bonhomie (well, Otto's equivalent thereof, anyway) and resultant stark panic led credence to Walter's suspicion that the shipments had been mixed-up -- the fool probably had a goblin post them. Again.
And that had been the cue to frantically contact Fragwa and call off the hunt for the blue station wagon, which he had somehow entirely forgotten about in all that had transpired. Full circle on the saga of Barbara Lake and the Missing Key.
"Another fine showing for the armies of darkness," he drawled to no one. "Bad luck, Andrei." He poured out the last of his wine on the ground in commemoration. "Keep a lower profile in the next life."
Stupid of Korshas to have gotten so cocky, advertising things he couldn't sell to people who didn't like to hear 'no' -- and Bular couldn't wait to make an example of him, declaring him 'compromised' as though he would know the first thing about that, hah. Walter knew a taunt when he saw one.
Officially, he and Bular were roughly equals in the chain of command, which had never sat well with Gunmar's son. Bular had been a battle-leader in his father's army, and the only non-Changeling Gumm-Gumm this side of the Bridge. Stricklander, meanwhile, was a jumped-up slave who had clawed his way to the top and (mostly) stayed there.
It had never been an willing partnership. Saving the brute's life had been a mistake, in more ways than one --
-- the stress and the wine were starting to feel cumulative, which meant he could smell the floor polish and the trenches and he carefully put the cup down and counted to ten. The city glowed. The night was calm. He was alone, with only his thoughts for company.
Normally, that would be a more than acceptable state of affairs, especially after the string of sub-par conversations that he'd been subjected to today -- but there had been an hour, just one blessed slice of ease in this otherwise hellish day when there had been nothing to do but charm and be charmed.
Barbara Lake. Unusual woman. Lightning in her bones.
She'd been so silent in the grocery store, so self-contained. Barely holding it together - well, given the state of her marriage, small wonder. And her countenance had split the difference between panicked and procedural when they'd met again, and now -- flowing words, banter and warmth and wry smiles. Strange to think these women were all the same person -- but then again, not that strange.
"'Suddenly holy Janus in marvelous two-headed form / Thrust his binary face before my eyes.'" Walter smiled ruefully. "'Clutching a staff in his right hand, a key in his left . . '"