Ricardo quickly aims at the stranger, but you push his pistol barrel down.
As shaggy as his appearance may be—wolf-gray hair that falls in a tangle over a face bloated by alcohol; shabby clothing; yellowing teeth; and black-as-onyx eyes that glitter with cold cynicism—Rick Bredon is one of the best in the world at what he does: detective work, bounty hunting, and monster killing. Little gets past you (you like to think) but he outmatches you to an exponential degree, and not only at the tracking and trapping. Never bring a knife to a gunfight, goes the old adage, but as the people who ambushed you learned to their regret, there's a truer one: Never bring a gun to a knife fight with Rick Bredon.
"Tell your boytoy to keep still, I’m not gonna gut him," Rick calls up to you in his gruff baritone. "Until I'm ready to."
Ricardo cusses under his breath, and raises the pistol again. You push it down more firmly. "Don't let him get to you," you warn.
Then you shout down to Rick: "These aren't your usual hunting grounds, Bredon."
"I don't got a choice, not when it's you I'm looking for, mamita." He leans on the word, and you flush.
Mamita. Rick can’t bother himself with real names, so he uses the most irritating nickname he can invent. Yours hits especially hard, because he borrowed it from your mother: It was her endearment for you, and it crawls all over you when Rick uses it.
But he's still talking. "I wanna talk to you, mamita. Tell Antonio Banderas he can dangle."
Ricardo explodes: "¿Y éste que se cree, hablándome así?"
"He trained me. And you see those two guys down there, the ones with the guns whose pants he's cleaning his knife on? That's why he can talk to you that way."
Ricardo spins around and stalks off, cussing to himself. "Ricardo!" you call after him.
"I’m going to scout the area!" he says. "Call me when you’re done with the Fisherman."
Fisherman? The too-apt sobriquet gives you a jolt. "What did he call me?" Rick growls from below.
"It doesn't mean anything," you quickly reply, though you yourself are far from certain. The reference, if there is one, baffles you. "What do you want to tell me?"
But suspicion is written large on Rick's face. For Rick Bredon is not merely a highly skilled hunter. He is a member of the Stellae Errantes, the same company of prodigies that your mother belonged to, and with whom you serve as an associate. And one of his ousiarchs is Eldibria, the planet of oceans and waters.
Once, one of Rick's trainees—the insolently gabby Joe Durras—once tried to tag him with the nickname "Quint," in reference to the professional shark hunter in Jaws, until Rick persuaded him of the folly of the attempt.
So for Ricardo, who so far as you believe knows nothing of the very secretive Stellae, to call him "Fisherman"—
"It doesn't mean anything, Rick. It's an insult that doesn't translate," you improvise. "What do you want to tell me?"
He's not placated, you can tell, but at least he drops the topic. "I came to tell you that that thing Spin's so spun up about has popped up again."
Spin. Another nickname, from "Spin and Marty," his nicknames for Jeff and Marty Harrison. "So why are you telling me?" you ask. "Shouldn't you be talking to Jeff?"
"I did. Him and the Old Man. They told me to come find you."
"Jeff could've called me direct."
"I asked to be the messenger."
"You? Why?"
He gives you a very long and steady look. It's the kind of look that some people would say "went right through me." But with Rick, it's the kind of look that goes into you and never stops going into you, never stops peeling back the layers, peeling them back and laying them bare only until they are pulled back to expose the layer underneath. It takes nerves of iron not to quail under his gaze.
"Because you've been avoiding me, mamita," he says. His voice turns soft, but there's a bitterness to it.
"Not intentionally. I've been busy."
"I know. Ever since Brazil."
He lets the word burn in your ears as he pulls out a hip flask, to drink from it so deeply he might have drained it completely. "Good moonshine," he says. "Do they really add meat to it?"
"You could have come found me anytime you wanted to see me."
"Yes, and here I am." He glances at the dead mercenaries at his feet. "Lucky for you."
You flush. "We could have taken them. I wasn't your star pupil for nothing."
"You were never my star pupil, mamita, and after this afternoon I'm thinking of yanking your diploma. A nice cock-up you and Lorenzo made of it."
"We got three of them before—"
"You didn't even get the right cave."
"What?"
"They laid you out a breadcrumb trail that glowed so bright a blind man could've followed it through a coal mine at midnight. And you still wound up at the wrong spot. They were waiting for you up yonder"—he jerks his chin at another mountain—"and had to improvise when they realized you dummies were camped out down here."
Rick grinds the heel of his hand into the side of his temple. "I only got here the day before yesterday, found the same well-paved highway of rumors and ready-made corpses, and I still got to the right spot. Sauntered along behind when they scrambled down here, let you and Zorro get a couple of 'em so you'd feel good about yourselves, and when I got tired of waiting for you to finish 'em off—"
"Alright, you made your point. ¡Gracias, Dios mío! Were they from Brazil?"
"Not from it, but it's the same general company."
"Why didn't they come for me in New Jersey?"
Rick opens his mouth to answer, then cocks his head. Though his eyes are like tiny pits in his bloated face, you can tell they are wandering over the landscape around and in back of you. You have the impression he's listening hard.
"Because," he says, "it's easier to trap and hide a body here than it is there. At least, that's what I told myself when I asked myself that question, and I liked the answer well enough when I gave it.
"But now that I've found you and delivered the Old Man's message," he continues, "how about you go find Senor Lambada and we head back to civilization. There's nothing here for you. For anyone."
--
Ricardo is very surly when you find him, but not too surly to ask you what Rick wanted to talk to you about.
"He brought a message from Jeff," you reply. "So I have to go back home."
But that's all you tell him and all you have to tell him, for he knows about Jeff—or, at least, he knows all that he needs to know.
Jeff and Marty Harrison are a pair of orphans, taken in by another Stellae, John Reilly, after their parents were viciously done away with by a warlock. Jeff, it was proved, was himself a Stellae, one of the rare adepts of Sulva, and as he was trained to join their company, Marty was trained to become an associate, like you.
In the beginning, Marty was your protege, but you became closer to Jeff after a time, after he told you of his parents. The romance between you bloomed quickly, and you became engaged. It is the ring he gave you that you sport on your finger. After his training was complete (a matter of five years) he even joined you in your own private vendetta, a hunt for a basilisk, the dragon-like creature whose venom claimed the life of your mother. You were glad of his help—at least, until disaster struck on a hunt in Brazil—even though it was clearly a kind of psychological displacement for him. He was helping you hunt the killer of your mother, when what he wanted was to hunt the presumed killer of his.
And now Rick Bredon has come to tell you that the "thing" Jeff has sought has reappeared. That would be the Compendio Summa Libra Personae, the infamous grimoire that the warlock used to rob Jeff of his parents. Interesting that the Summa should reappear without the magician, you think. But it's a treacherous book, laying waste and death in its trail. Even if Aubrey Blackwell escapes justice, it will be good to lay the Summa on a shelf in the Stellae archives, and drive a stake through it.
--
At dinner that night, which you take alone with Rick, he confirms that it's the Summa and not Blackwell that is being tracked. It's not in hand yet, he tells you. But there are strong indications of its location.
"What's Jeff going to do about it?" you ask.
"He sent me to find you and bring you back."
"Why does he want me?"
Rick glowers.
"Can't you guess?" he asks in a bitter growl.
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