Hart & Boot & Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

was too old for this by at least a dozen years. In his younger, hungrier days, such a setback would only have infuriated and energized him, given him an adrenal surge and a slow-burning determination to soldier on, but he’d long since grown out of such dedication to his work for its own sake. For many years he’d crafted an image of himself as an implacable nightstalker, relentless avatar of death, and he’d seen his work as a sort of nightmarish inversion of a holy mission.
    But he’d just turned forty-five, he suffered chronic lower back pain, he found it increasingly embarrassing to sleep with prostitutes less than half his age, and he’d spent the past dozen birthdays and New Year’s Eves alone in his home amid the redwoods above Santa Cruz, California. He’d lost all illusions about his career. He was neither avenging angel nor cinematic assassin; he was simply a man who’d spent a lot of years killing people for money. This job was more of the same, despite certain baroque complications and supernatural curlicues.
    Though there was the promise of something more than money as payment if he succeeded in taking Archibald Grace’s life.
    Zealand got to his feet. No use mourning the moment of failure. Better to push himself, weary or not, onward to the possibility of success. He reloaded his pistols and redistributed his knives. Now he had to make his way back down to the foot of the tower. Maybe the guards wouldn’t harry him so, if he was only trying to leave. He could hope for that much.
    ***
    The next day Zealand met his client, the thus-far-immortal Archibald Grace himself. They shared their usual booth at their usual Italian restaurant, Grace drinking cheap house wine, Zealand sticking to water.
    “Damn,” Grace said. “I thought for sure I’d left it there.” Grace looked like a young man, with a neat black beard and eyes the clear blue of synthetic sapphires.
    “You were sure you’d left it in Mammoth Caves, too,” Zealand said with practiced patience. “Sure you’d left it in the Great Sequoia Forest, certain it was in your old summer palace at the bottom of Lake Champlain, and positive it was hidden behind Niagara Falls. I am beginning to suspect you need a tutorial in the proper meaning of the words ‘sure,’ ‘certain,’ and ‘positive.’”
    “I am sorry,” Grace said, looking into his wine. “You can have ownership of the tower, of course, as usual.”
    “Oh, good,” Zealand said. “It will go nicely with the mud-slimed cave full of ghosts behind Niagara, and the sinkhole decorated with obscene pictographs in Mammoth Caves. Though I admit the palace in Champlain is nice. If it weren’t also the den of an aquatic monster, I might even go back there. I’d like the tower better if it weren’t full of homicidal beasts and your wizened homunculi.”
    “There’s a phrase, to stop them from attacking you,” Grace said, making a familiar grasping motion with his left hand. “But I’ve forgotten it. I’ve forgotten so many things.” He still stared into his wine, as if he might find his missing memories at the bottom of the glass.
    Zealand, who was not a man given to casual gestures of physical affection, reached across to touch Grace’s hand. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll find your life, and I will crush it. You will die.”
    “I’m sure it’s in North America,” Grace said. “I moved everything with me when I came here. I came with the....” He made the grasping motion again.
    “The Vikings,” Zealand said, sitting back. “On the longboats. You’ve told me.”
    “I brought my life, my soul, hidden in a stone. Or, perhaps, an egg.” Grace cupped his hands around a half-remembered roundness. “All the wizards and witches and giants and monsters knew the trick, to put your life somewhere safe, so your body couldn’t be killed. So long as your life is safe, you live. We used to hide our souls in tree trunks, until the witch hunters began putting whole