Spellcrash Read Free Page B

ground had once been a hill with a home under it, the home of a dear friend whose life had paid for the freedom of Fenris and his fellow Norse deities, a friend I had killed.

    “You miss Ahllan, too, don’t you?” Melchior walked over to stand beside me.

    “It’s more than that,” I said.

    Melchior looked up at me, his expression shrewd. “You believe you’re responsible for her death, and you’re feeling guilty.”

    “I am responsible for her death, Mel. I killed her as surely as if I’d put a bullet in her heart. I may have had the best motive in the world, but the details don’t change a thing.”

    “Bullshit.” Melchior’s voice was flat and the coldest I’d ever heard it.

    “What?”

    “I said, ‘Bullshit.’” Melchior glared up at me. “That’s guilt talking, not sense. Details mean everything. Shooting someone because you don’t like the color of their jacket is senseless murder. Shooting someone who’s about to kill you is self-defense. Shooting someone as part of an honest, trial-generated execution is justice.”

    “No matter how you slice it, somebody ends up dead and somebody else ends up a killer.”

    “Look, I don’t know exactly what happened there at the end,” said Melchior. “But I do know you and what you’re capable of. I also know, or knew, Ahllan. She was the closest thing I have to a mother. The computer that absorbed her memories told us that Ahllan believed what you did was right. Between the two, I know enough to call bullshit on all this ‘I killed her’ angst. There was a lot more in the balance than just Ahllan’s life. Can you look me in the eye and tell me that what you did didn’t have to be done?”

    I looked away. “I could have saved her.”

    “That wasn’t the question.”

    How could I explain it to him? Yes, I’d done no more than what I had to, but that didn’t make it any better. Ahllan’s life was over, and it was my fault.

    I was still trying to figure out what to say when Fenris bounced to a stop in front of me. “I feel better ! So, where to next?”

    “I know just the place,” I said.

    It was the strangest game of Risk I’d ever played. The board lay on a huge gray slab of granite.
    On one side lolled Cerberus, or more accurately, Mort, Dave, and Bob, since the heads were each playing individually. Fenris sat to their left, looking rather like the world’s scariest puppy by comparison. The wolf of Asgard is the size of a draft horse and looks like he eats busloads of children as often as he can get them, but the hound of Hades is built more along the lines of what you’d get if you crossed the great-granddaddy of all bulldogs with a carnivorous elephant. Add a disembodied hand and me to the picture and place the whole thing on the banks of the Styx with the Gates of Hades in the background, and you get something that makes Dogs Playing Poker look downright Norman Rockwell by comparison.

    “You cheat,” growled Bob, a Doberman, and my least favorite head. He’d just lost a battle for Iceland.

    “How could I cheat?” replied Dave, the rottweiler middle head whom I usually partnered at bridge. “It’s luck. You roll the dice and take your lumps.”

    “He’s right,” said Mort, the mastiff.

    “He cheats,” said Bob.

    “Are you going to keep repeating that all night long, or are you going to finish your turn and pass the dice?” asked Fenris.

    The big wolf looked like he was having the time of his life, and maybe he was. I’m pretty sure that growing up in a place where everyone treated you as a monster because a prophecy said you were inevitably going to turn into one would have a distorting effect on your sense of fun. It might also turn you into a monster.

    That it hadn’t spoke to the innate resiliency of . . . people? Giant wolves? Gods? Don’t get me wrong; he was still a giant, slavering deity in wolf shape, if a much less powerful one. And he was potentially capable of all sorts of harm and