Free Book 1 - Shadowline by Glen Cook Page A

of Edgeward City on Blackworld, had made a contract
presentation.
    Mouse could guess the drift. Everyone had come from the meeting
damp with apprehension. He could smell their anger and distress.
Richard had not been understanding. Blake’s man had tried a
little arm-twisting.
    A squeaky Dee-giggle rippled across the room. Good old Uncle
Michael was the life of the party.
    His loud, flashy presence was doing nothing for anybody’s
nerves. Amid the dour, ascetically clad soldiers he was a focus of
peacock brightness, raucous as a macaw. At the moment he was a
clown vainly trying for a laugh from his brother’s staff. The
sour, sullen, sometimes hateful, sometimes suspicious stares of
Storm, Cassius, and Wulf and Helmut Darksword intimidated him not
at all. Storm’s sons he ignored completely, except for the
occasional puzzled glance at Lucifer or Mouse.
    Lucifer was more sour than his father. He moved with a stiff
tension that bespoke rage under incomplete control. He watched
Michael with deadly eyes. He snapped and snarled, threatening to go
off like some unpredictable bomb. He should have been overjoyed to
have his wife home.
    Mouse’s presence was a puzzling anomaly to everyone. He
was enjoying their baffled reactions. They knew he was supposed to
be at Academy. They knew that even midshipmen who were the sons of
men as well-known and respected as Gneaus Storm did not receive
leave time without strings being pulled at stratospheric levels.
Michael’s nervous gaze returned to him again and again.
    Dee was sharply observant behind his clown mask. His eyes never
stopped roving. And Mouse seldom let his attention stray far from
Dee.
    Michael was worried.
    Mouse sensed his uncle’s nervousness. He felt a hundred
other emotional eddies. He was enveloped by an oppressive sense of
descending fate, as heavy as age itself.
    Hatred for Michael Dee. Distrust of the Blake Vice President.
Worry about Richard. Benjamin almost obsessive in his dread of what
his father would do about his part in the attack on the Hawksblood
cruiser. Lucifer, marginally psychotic, confusing his feelings
about his wife, his father, Dee, Hawksblood, Benjamin, and
distracted by suspicion, jealousy, and self-loathing.
Homer . . . Homer was being Homer.
    Mouse wondered if his father was making a mistake by letting
Benjamin stew. Ben was not as well-balanced as he liked to pretend.
He had nightmares constantly. Now he seemed to be sliding into a
daytime obsession with the dream.
    Benjamin dreamed about his own death. For years he had laughed
the dreams off. The attack on Hawksblood’s ship seemed to
have made a believer of him. He was running scared.
    Mouse glanced at his brother. Benjamin never had taken him in.
Ben was nothing but flashy façade. Mouse felt nothing but pity.
    The brothers Darksword also had the disease of the moment. They
were mad at everybody. Like Storm, they had expected The Broken
Wings to be their last campaign. They had expected to live out
their lives as gentlemen farmers on a remote, pastoral world far
from the cares of the Iron Legion. They were overdue to leave the
Fortress already, but ties two centuries deep had proven difficult
to break.
    Mouse looked at his father.
    Storm had been motionless, brooding, for almost an hour. Now he
was shaking like a big dog coming out of the water. He skewered the
mining executive with a deadly glance. Mouse moved along the wall
behind his father, the better to hear.
    “We can buy a little time on this thing. Helmut. Wulf.
Cassius.”
    Michael Dee appeared to lean slightly, to stretch an ear.
    Storm said, “Kill the Blackworlder. Neatly. See that the
corpse reaches Helga Dee. Without her knowing the
source.”
    The condemned man was too stunned to protest.
    “You did say Helga’s World was mentioned in those
papers Richard said he found, didn’t you, Cassius?”
    “Yes.”
    “And again on Michael’s ship.” Storm stared
down at Michael Dee. One droplet of sweat rolled down