Hart & Boot & Other Stories by Tim Pratt Read Free Book Online

mountain at the top of the world was large and cold, and peer as he might back through the layers of time—visible to Sigmund as layers of gauze, translucent as sautéed onions, decade after decade peeling away under his gaze—he could not see a time when this room had not existed on this spot, bare but potent, as if only recently vacated by the God who’d created and abandoned the world.
    Sigmund approached the shrine, and there it was. The cup. The prize and goal and purpose of a hundred generations of the Table. The other members of the Table were dead, the whole world was dead, except for Sigmund.
    He did not reach for the cup. Instead, he walked to the arched window and looked out. Peering back in time he saw mountains and clouds and the passing of goats. But in the present he saw only fire, twisting and writhing, consuming rock as easily as trees, with a few mountain peaks rising as yet untouched from the flames. Sigmund had not loved the world much—he’d enjoyed the music of Bach, violent movies, and vast quantities of cocaine—and by and large he could have taken or left civilization. Still, knowing the world was consumed in fire made him profoundly sad.
    Sigmund returned to the shrine and seized the cup—heavy, stone, more blunt object than drinking vessel—and prepared to sip.
    But then, at the last moment, Sigmund didn’t drink. He did something else instead.
    But first:
    Or, arguably, later:
    ***
    Sigmund slumped in the back seat, Carlsbad lurking on the floorboards in his semi-liquid noctiluscent form, Carlotta tapping her razored silver fingernails on the steering wheel, and Ray—the newest member of the Table—fiddling with the radio. He popped live scorpions from a plastic bag into his mouth. Tiny spines were rising out of Ray’s skin, mostly on the nape of his neck and the back of his hands, their tips pearled with droplets of venom.
    “It was a beautiful service,” Sigmund said. “They sent the Old Doctor off with dignity.”
    Carlsbad’s tarry body rippled. Ray turned around, frowning, face hard and plain as a sledgehammer, and said, “What the fuck are you talking about, junkie? We haven’t even gotten to the funeral home yet.”
    Sigmund sank down in his seat. This was, in a way, even more embarrassing than blacking out.
    “Blood and honey,” Carlotta said, voice all wither and bile. “How much of that shit did you snort this morning, that you can’t even remember what day it is?”
    Sigmund didn’t speak. They all knew he could see into the past, but none of them knew the full extent of his recent gyrations through time. Lately he’d been jerking from future to past and back again without compass or guide. Only the Old Doctor had known about that, and now that he was dead, it was better kept a secret.
    They reached the funeral home, and Sigmund had to go through the ceremony all over again. Grief—unlike sex, music, and cheating at cards—was not a skill that could be honed by practice.
    ***
    The Old Doctor welcomed Sigmund, twenty years old and tormented by visions, into the library at the Table’s headquarters. Shelves rose everywhere like battlements, the floors were old slate, and the lights were ancient crystal-dripping chandeliers, but the Old Doctor sat in a folding chair at a card table heaped with books.
    “I expected, well, something more ,” Sigmund said, thumping the rickety table with his hairy knuckles. “A big slab of mahogany or something, a table with authority.”
    “We had a fine table once,” the Old Doctor said, eternally middle-aged and absently professorial. “But it was chopped up for firewood during a siege in the 1600s.” He tapped the side of his nose. “There’s a lesson in that. No asset, human or material, is important compared to the continued existence of the organization itself.”
    “But surely you’re irreplaceable,” Sigmund said, awkward attempt at job security through flattery. The room shivered and blurred at the edges of his