The Cold Smell Of Sacred Stone

you've lost, it probably wasn't long enough. The lights came back on about ten minutes after you fainted. I cleaned you up a little, and managed to stitch the wound.'

'Jesus. With one hand, no less.'

Veil shrugged, then wiggled the fingers of his right hand. 'The arm may be in a cast, but I can still use the hand. Suturing is a little skill I picked up out of necessity during the war, when I had to tend to my own knitting, so to speak. I think I managed to clean out the wound pretty good with peroxide, and the sutures will keep it closed until we can get you to a plastic surgeon to have it done properly.'

'I'm sure the sewing job you did is as good as I'm going to get anywhere.'

'Wrong. You could end up with a nasty scar, and I can't be sure there won't be an infection. I poured a bottle of peroxide in there, but the rag you used to stanch the bleeding was covered with green paint; you looked like a Christmas decoration. As soon as I get some herbal tea down you, I'm going to drive you to a hospital emergency room.'

'The wound bled a lot, right?'

'Indeed.'

'And the stitches you put in will hold until it heals?'

'As long as you don't do a lot of walking on your hands or opening doors with your head, they should.'

'Good. I'll pass on the trip to a hospital. I'm too old to worry about my looks, and a scar on my face is probably just what I need to put a good scare into my enemies.'

'Mongo-'

'I don't want to have to answer a lot of questions, Veil,' I said seriously, 'and that's what will happen if I go to a hospital emergency room. I can't very well claim I cut myself shaving. I can always claim I was slashed by a mugger, but then somebody's going to want to get the police involved. Considering our somewhat complicated situation, I don't think that's a good idea.'

'You could have a point.' Veil paused, grinned. 'All those cute little co-eds who already think you're so sexy will really go crazy with lust if you show up in class with a huge scar on your forehead. Then again, you may be asked to head up the school's German dueling society.'

'I'm not teaching any longer,' I said, trying and failing to keep the bitterness I felt out of my voice.

Veil raised his eyebrows slightly. 'No?'

'You don't know about it, but the university lined up with everyone else who tried to squash Garth and me while we were looking for you. Madison's people got to both the police and the school. The NYPD suspended Garth, without pay, for supposedly aiding and abetting a criminal-me; Christ, they assigned him to tag along with me and then busted his ass for doing precisely that. The university took all my classes away from me and started making noises about taking away my tenure on the grounds of moral turpitude. Then they offered me a raise and the chairmanship of the department after it was all over. I told them to shove it, and I submitted my letter of resignation yesterday. I wanted nothing more to do with those people.'

Veil studied me for a few moments, then slowly nodded his head, perhaps sensing that my aborted teaching career wasn't something I felt like talking about. 'I'm going to make you some of my super-duper herbal tea,' he said at last. 'It will perk you right up.'

'I'd rather have Scotch.'

'Somehow, that doesn't surprise me at all,' Veil said, walking away toward the entrance to the kitchen. 'First, the tea.'

'I feel like a Goddamn old lady,' I called out, slowly sitting up on the edge of the bed, then bracing myself with my hands and closing my eyes when the room started to tilt.

'Why?' Veil called from the other side of the partition.

'I don't usually pass out so easily.'

'Hey, my friend, when somebody bounces a shuriken off your forehead and you lose as much blood as you did, the only reasonable thing to do is pass out. Ask anybody. You're lucky you have a thick skull. Incidentally, I'm sorry I wasn't able to stop him from doing that. I should have kept a closer eye on him.'

'You're sorry you weren't able to stop him?! I was the one with the gun, remember? By the way, that was some number you did on him. But why the hell didn't you just bop him on the head with your nunchaku, or stick a knife between his ribs?'

'You'd already put a bullet in his shoulder,' Veil replied dryly. 'It didn't seem quite sporting for me to use weapons.'

'Sporting?!'

Veil came back into the bedroom carrying a huge ceramic mug filled to the brim with a steaming, perfectly foul-smelling liquid. 'Well, you'd been telling me what a bad-ass this guy was, and he obviously thought he was a bad-ass, along with his various employers. I was curious as to how he'd fight; I thought I might learn something.'

At first I thought he had to be joking, but when I looked into his face I could see that he was serious. I shook my head in amazement. 'Jesus Christ. I knew you were damn good, and I never doubted that you could beat Kitten, but I never imagined that anyone could have done it so easily. I think I'll start calling you sir.'

'Drink this,' Veil said, handing me the mug. 'Watch it; it's hot.'

I sipped at the disgusting brown liquid, almost gagged. 'What the hell is this stuff?!'

'I told you; super-duper herbal tea. Mother Kendry's magic healing potion.'

'It tastes like you washed your socks and jock in it after our last workout.'

'Drink it; all of it. It will make you feel better.'

He was right about that. With Veil occasionally prodding me by raising my elbow, I drained off the mug. The throbbing in my forehead eased dramatically, the room no longer threatened to turn upside down on me, and I felt decidedly stronger, less groggy.

'So,' I said as I set the empty mug down on the bed's side table, 'now we have to figure out what to do with our departed assassin.'

Veil nodded as he sat down next to me on the bed and absently adjusted his sling, which he had changed. 'If we call the police, they're going to be all over the two of us; Kitten just doesn't look like your average burglar, especially in this neighborhood.'

'You got that right. If they identify him-or if they can't identify him, which seems more likely-the cops are going to be leaning very heavily on us for explanations, which we can't give. Shannon's done his part, and we're all home free at the moment; but it's all over if anyone manages to make a link between that dead assassin and Orville Madison. If the cops check with Interpol, they'll find out that Garth filed a request for information on a guy that turned out to be Henry Kitten. A lot of worms will come crawling out of a lot of cans.'

'Worms,' Veil said, and smiled thinly. 'You feel up to helping me with a little spring planting? I'll reward you with a Scotch from your special reserve I keep under the kitchen counter.'

We gained access to the alley, which was blocked off from the street at both ends by rusting chain-link fences, through a triple-bolted steel door in the basement of the gutted building. Clambering through a treacherous jungle of rubber tires, twisted shards of rusting metal, various unrecognizable objects, garbage, and a host of scurrying, dog-sized rats, we finally made our way to the mound of junk on which the broken body of Henry Kitten lay askew, leaking blood from all its orifices. Along the way I'd picked up half of a broken steel pole, with one jagged, splayed end. Veil kicked aside some soggy cardboard, and I began digging with my makeshift shovel in the soft, rotting earth which had been exposed.

'Easy does it, Mongo,' Veil said as he leaned back against a tangled pile of lumber and steel. If he was the least bit concerned about having a corpse buried beneath the windows of a loft where he lived and worked, he certainly didn't show it. He'd assured me that it would be at least a hundred years before anyone found the remains of Henry Kitten, and-considering the neighborhood-nobody in the next century would give them a second thought. Our conversation-spiced spring planting expedition might have seemed a tad macabre to me if I hadn't been so happy to be rid of Henry Kitten. 'You don't want to start that wound bleeding.'

'Listen, pal, with that tea you gave me I feel like I could staff an entire gravediggers' union by myself. What the hell is in that stuff? Cocaine?'