Charlinder's Walk (42 page)

"Remember those people who brought you to me?" she asked while he helped her prepare their lunch for the day.

"I suppose."

"They asked me for a protection spell to make sure no more crazy people enter their land," she said matter-of-factly.

"Can't blame them for that."

"And I told them you weren't crazy, just lost, so they said, then, make sure no one else loses their way in their part of the land. I told them I couldn't make them any promises."

"So, have you tried that protection spell?" he asked.

"I was working on it just now. If I did a spell against crazy people, then a few of their own might wander off and never be seen again, and the village wouldn't thank me for that. If they want to be spared from mental discomfort, I'm afraid that's a protection I don't want to provide, but I have to do
something
if they're going to keep me in laying hens."

"I'm sure they just don't want to see another strange guy getting in their kids' faces," Charlinder suggested, though he suspected Gentiola wasn't really listening to him.

"So eventually, I just gave up and said, okay, no one from farther away than Perugia or Verona can enter their territory. Strangers would have to go around their land." With a final shrug she said, "I'm sure they'll get over it before the spell wears off."

"How long do these spells usually last?"

"Several months, usually."

"So, then, when the spells wear off after a few months, the locals need to come to you again for a renewal," he said.

"Yes, they do. So I barter for more goods that way."

"So, why don’t you just keep them protected against catastrophe all the time? And why just the locals? Couldn’t you use your abilities to make sure all survivors are safe from natural disasters?"

"The world over?" she asked skeptically.

"Why not?"

"If I had the kind of power you’re talking about," said Gentiola, leaning in to peer closely at him, "then I would gladly do it for free, because if I were that powerful, I wouldn’t need to barter with anyone."

"You have the power to destroy the world," said Charlinder, "and you can’t look after the few people who are left?"

"I do
not
have the power to destroy the world," said Gentiola. "I never did. I had the power to construct the DNA sequence of a new microorganism." She looked down at the countertop, studiously keeping her face out of Charlinder’s view. "There is no 'just' in doing magic. You don’t 'just' move the Earth’s resources around whenever someone could use a bit of help. Every liter of water that runs in this house has a price."

She didn’t stay in that mood for long; she perked up again once she had something to eat, and then she went right on behaving as though Charlinder didn’t need to know anything more. As the day went on and Gentiola had little use for him, he found himself at the door of the small room upstairs where she kept her memories stored in yarn. He realized that what he was doing was the very furthest thing from polite, but if he could find anything that gave any insight into what she might do in the future, then there was a reason.

The rack full of mini-skeins stood in front of him. Their wooden tags were unhelpfully plain, so he had to grasp the yarn to identify the memory. He started with the eighth skein from the top left; it showed multitudes of people doing strange things that Charlinder could never do in his lifetime, but it had nothing to do with the Plague. He tried the next, and several more after that; none of them were the least bit helpful. He gave up the chronological sequence and made a random grab at a later memory.

The room was full of glass: a complex network of tubes, oddly shaped bottles, and flat dishes interspersed with metal apparatuses. Gentiola, dressed much like he'd seen Eileen in the memory, though clean and untorn, stumbled into the room and grabbed a dish. She dropped it to the floor and smashed it under her strongly-shod heel. Next she took an angular-bodied glass bottle and threw it at the opposite wall, where it smashed to glittering grit. She grabbed the narrow end of a table piled high with equipment and turned it on its opposite end while the contents shattered in a frightened, traumatized round of soprano cacophony. She continued her rampage around the wood-walled, light-filled chamber until all the glass was smashed and all the metal was bent and distorted beyond its original function. She clung to the sill of the nearest open window and wailed like a drowning cat.

Charlinder put it back before he saw any more. He took another, very delicately, by its wooden tag from earlier in the series. Upon holding the yarn, he saw this was a much calmer and more lucid memory. There was Gentiola in her crisp white jacket, standing in the room of light and glass. She tested liquids in the bottles, examined colonies growing in the dishes, and Charlinder knew, as surely as Gentiola had known at that time, that she would soon have what she needed and the danger would be past.

It all felt just as intimate and shameful as he would expect from snooping in someone’s memories, but there was no useful information in what he saw. There was a pervasive, forbidding sense of distress in the previous one, but it all it told him was that she would not be able to develop another microorganism in the foreseeable future. She had plenty of time beyond that.

"Oh, you beat me to it," said Gentiola. There she was, standing in the doorway; her voice nearly made him jump. Suddenly he felt like a ten-year-old squatting in a twenty-three-year-old’s body, but still not sorry for what he hoped to find. "You really shouldn't poke around in other people's memories," she pointed out, "but I can hardly fault you for curiosity, and I was just thinking, I really need to give you one of these before you go home."

"You do?"

"Yes, I do. If you go home with nothing but the words I've told you, then it'll just be one more story that gets passed around the bonfire." She picked up another skein from the board, later in the series than the one that showed her destroying inanimate objects. "I could hardly call myself a scientist if I didn't provide you with some evidence," she said, handing the skein to him by its tag. "Take this back to your room, give it a look, and if you find it useful, pack it up with your belongings," she instructed.

"But this is your memory," he said. "Shouldn't you at least make a copy of it first?"

"It's not something I'm likely to forget," she said. "And you need it more than I do."

His eyes widened quickly, involuntarily, at this pronouncement. He needed her memory more than she did?

"I wouldn't want your village to tear itself apart," she explained, "because they don't know what I did."

"What does it show?" he asked.

"You should take it back to the guest room, and look at it alone," she said. "And when you’re finished with that, why don’t you come to my bedroom?" she suggested, and sauntered out of the room with a subtle wiggle of her hips.

While that was more than a little bit presumptuous of her, he could certainly take a look at the memory she’d offered. He went back to the guest room as she’d instructed, and grasped the yarn.

There was Gentiola as Charlinder knew her--calm, loose-robed and intensely focused--standing in front of her globe. She coaxed out a bit of light from the great glowing sphere, and it became a cluster of faces. She whispered to them, blew it back to its source, and drew out another face. She repeated this ritual, over and over, with hundreds of faces, and to each group she whispered the same thing: "The Plague is finished now. You're safe."

Charlinder let out a deep breath and enclosed the memory in his pack next to Eileen's journals. That would indeed be useful as evidence, but it still left the question of whether she might make another Plague in the future. He would just have to keep asking. There was no way around that.

He did not expect to draw her out by refusing to go where she was, as it was obvious that she had far more capacity to keep him waiting than he had over her. Therefore, he went where she had invited him. Her bedroom was surprisingly spare; only a bed the same size as the one she'd provided for him, a simple carpet and a few nondescript pieces of furniture. She stood coyly in the middle of the room, looking pleased but in no way surprised to see him in her doorway.

"Does this mean you want me to leave?" he asked.

"What ever do you mean?"

"You gave me some evidence to take home. Does that mean I’ve worn out my welcome?"

"Of course not! That was something I needed to make sure to give you, but you are welcome to stay until you’re ready to leave."

"Well, thank you. So, you asked me to come in here?"

"Yes. Our night by the fireplace," she began, "was just lovely, but I do appreciate a proper setting." She raised one leg just enough to rest her knee on the bed.

It was hardly a surprise, but still Charlinder thought that took a lot of ego on her part.

"A proper setting for what?" he asked.

Gentiola blinked in surprise. "You don't know what I have in mind?"

"I want you to say it out loud."

At this, she smiled; a wonderfully mischievous, excited smile.

"I want you to put your cock in me again," she answered.

She certainly has no need for euphemisms
, he thought. Outwardly he said, "How long have you been planning this?"

"Since yesterday morning, I suppose. Now, shall we begin?"

"Okay," he answered. "Take off your clothes and sit on the bed," he instructed.

She did so with a cheeky arch of her eyebrows at his assertive tone; she wiggled her shoulders and her gown fell to the floor, then she perched at the head of the bed with her legs curled to one side. "Your aura is pinking up again," she observed. "That's what I like to see."

While she surely thought that was a reassuring thing to say, to him it was a reminder that he had to tread carefully with her. She still couldn’t read his mind, but observing his mood was close enough. She had admitted to having the power to heal his body, and if she could heal, she could just as easily hurt. For that reason alone, what he was about to try was possibly the stupidest thing he would ever do, and in his life, that was saying something.

"Now I want you to touch yourself."

"Say it out loud, Char. Touch myself
how
?"

"I want to see you pet your pussycat."

With a truly irksome grin, Gentiola uncurled her legs, resting her heels at the edges of the bed. She spread her knees expressively wide--his cock began to stir rebelliously in his trousers--and started by running her hands up and down the back of her thighs. There was that scar on her leg, but he would have to wait until later to ask. He kept eye contact with her and willed himself to think non-arousing thoughts. She didn't make it any easier for him as she brought her hands around to the inside, but with a satisfactory guttural moan she finally started stroking her clit and let her eyes roll to the ceiling.

"This is what you wanted," she sighed, "isn't it?"

"Yeah, that's what I like to see."

"Oh, Char," she moaned, "you like to drive me crazy."

"You're so gorgeous, I can't help it," he said automatically.

"But I never," she sighed, writhing around on the bed, "would have expected you," she undulated some more, "to be a voyeur."

"There are a lot of things about me that people don't expect." He thought,
myself included
. Outwardly he said, "When I first saw you, I never would have expected you to be over 150 years old."

Gentiola made a noise resembling "Haaaangh," and then managed to speak through her pleasure: "Beauty secrets," she said in a gasp.

Charlinder could tell she was close to coming, or at least sufficiently distracted from his attention. Taking care not to make any revealing noise, he undressed. Gentiola, sufficiently excited to be rocking into her hand with closed eyes, remained oblivious.

She reached a point at which he was sure that if she touched herself for another ten seconds, she would orgasm, and that was when he took hold of her wrist.

Gentiola's eyes flew open as she fell still. Charlinder leaned over her, meeting her demanding gaze with hungry eyes.

"Not so fast," he said. He lowered himself between her legs. He took both Gentiola's hands in his and held them to the mattress on either side of her head. She was smiling scandalously again, stopping only when Charlinder kissed her. The way it felt was like learning how to swim, like he had to struggle to keep his head above the surface of the water. All he’d learned in the past three days took nothing away from how it felt to touch her and see her beautiful face smile at him. There he was, in bed with Gentiola, and he could just as easily let himself go and drown. Part of him said,
forget about the Plague, no one cares what she did, just stay here with her.
The other part of him rose above the surface and breathed.

"This is quite a game you're playing," she remarked when he released her mouth. She wasn't annoyed, but intrigued.

"Yes, I suppose it is," he agreed.

He stroked her arms while kissing her some more, on her mouth, her neck, her breasts, her shoulders. She took her right arm out of his hold and grasped his left buttock, pulling his hips upward. Charlinder pulled her hand off his backside and returned it to its position by her head. He couldn't have her surprising him like that.

"Stay right there?" he requested. She nodded her consent, and Charlinder let go of her left hand for just long enough to put himself in position. He brought his hand back to holding her arm in place, and Gentiola groaned in satisfaction, as he slid inside her.