There Shall Your Heart Be Also (3 page)

“It does,” January agreed. “But if we do more
than take a reasonable sum for services rendered, on the grounds
that as upstanding citizens we deserve the money more than she
does, how does that make us different from the man who slashed up
Delly with a knife?”

*

The next morning January took delivery of the
code-paper, and spent until early afternoon closeted up with the
Bible, deciphering names. “I’d like to get this back to the saloon
before it opens,” he said to Hannibal, who had put in an appearance
– at a far earlier hour than was usual for him to be about – to
assist. “The doctor I talked to said Porter’s wounds weren’t deep.
He should be able to use his arm by this evening. It would be a
shame if the book isn’t there when he makes his next attempt.”

Right on schedule, that evening, while
January was again changing Delly’s dressings, a tumult of shouting
and two shots resounded from the saloon below, followed a moment
later by Hannibal’s appearance at the top of the ladder. “He’s
downstairs,” gasped the fiddler, panting from even the climb. “Done
up as a preacher in the most ridiculous wig and false whiskers
you’ve ever seen—”

“Who got shot?” January scrambled down the
ladder after him, crossed to the porch at a run.

“Nobody – but Porter went down with what I
assume to be chicken-blood all over him like an Indian massacre.”
They sprang up the porch steps and peered through the Broadhorn’s
back door, in time to see a tallish, thin man in the shabby black
suit of an impoverished minister lying, gasping theatrically, on
the floor among a half-dozen kneeling ruffians. His hands and
gray-whiskered face were covered with gore in the saloon’s
uncertain lamplight.

“I’m dying! Oh, I’m dying! For the love of
God, is there a Bible in this house?”

As Williams promptly fetched the Holy Writ
from where January had stowed it earlier under the bar, Hannibal
and January traded a disbelieving glance. “I’ve seen better acting
at Christmas pantomimes,” Hannibal whispered.

The allegedly dying alleged preacher clutched
the volume to his insanguined chest and sobbed, “Bless you, my
daughter...”

And with a crash, the lights went out.

“Two accomplices,” reported Hannibal softly,
as he and January stepped aside to let three blundering forms
spring through the door between them and sprint away across the
yard.

Inside the saloon, men were crashing around
and cursing; a moment later a match flared, and someone exclaimed,
“Fuck me, where’d that preacher go?”

“Not badly done, though,” added the fiddler,
as he and January strolled back to the ladder. “Kentucky’s promised
us each ten percent of whatever we can retrieve from those bank
accounts, and twenty percent for Delly, which is very generous of
her. I’ll write to the Bank of New York tomorrow. I suspect that
our friend Mr. Porter’s in for a very frustrating few months,
writing to banks that no longer exist about accounts whose names he
doesn’t have right.”

“Oh, I didn’t substitute names,” said
January. “A man who considered it his right to carve up a
saloonkeeper and a completely innocent black girl – who’s going to
be scarred for the rest of her life – deserves more than a little
frustration. No, I wrote up a very elaborate treasure-map leading
to an island in the middle of the swamps below Villahermosa in the
south of Mexico: a friend of mine in Paris who’d been a doctor in
the French Navy under Napoleon told me about it. He said
nine-tenths of their men came down with fever there and most of
them died.
A land wrought by Satan
, he said,
to punish
sinners
.”

Hannibal’s eyes widened. “Do you think he’ll
go?”

“He will if he wants the four hundred and
fifty thousand dollars in Spanish gold I said was buried
there.”

“Considering the amount of money he’ll have
to borrow to finance an expedition,” mused Hannibal, “and the time
it will take, and the gnawing anxiety of knowing there’s a treasure
just waiting for him—”

“If he’s willing to seek it,” said January
gently. “Which we know, from his actions, that he is.
Where your
treasure is
– wholley imaginary, in this case --
there will
your heart be also
... and for Mr. Porter, almost certainly his
fever-ridden bones as well.”

Hannibal paused, his hand on the rungs of the
ladder. “For such a thoroughly nice man, Ben,” he said, “you can be
a complete son of a bitch.”

“Thank you,” said January. “I have my
moments. Now let’s start writing those letters to the banks, and
see how much of the real treasure is left to collect.”

About the Author

Since her first published fantasy in 1982 -
The Time of the Dark
- Barbara Hambly has touched most of
the bases in genre fiction. She has written mysteries, horror,
mainstream historicals, graphic novels, sword-and-sorcery fantasy,
romances, and Saturday Morning Cartoons. Born and raised in
Southern California, she attended the University of California,
Riverside, and spent one year at the University of Bordeaux,
France. She married science fiction author George Alec Effinger,
and lived part-time in New Orleans for a number of years. In her
work as a novelist, she currently concentrates on horror (the Don
Simon Ysidro vampire series) and historical whodunnits, the
well-reviewed Benjamin January novels, though she has also written
another historical whodunnit series under the name of Barbara
Hamilton.

Professor Hambly also teaches History
part-time, paints, dances, and trains in martial arts. Follow her
on Facebook, and on her blog at livejournal.com.

Now a widow, she shares a house in Los
Angeles with several small carnivores.

She very much hopes you will enjoy these
stories.

The Further
Adventures

by Barbara Hambly

The concept of “happily ever after” has
always fascinated me.

Just exactly what happens after, “happily
ever after”?

The hero/heroine gets the person of his/her
dreams, and rides off into the sunset with their loved one perched
on the back of the horse hanging onto saddlebags stuffed with gold.
(It’s a very strong horse.)

So what happens then? Where do they live? Who
does the cooking?

This was one of the reasons I started writing
The Further Adventures.

The other was that so many of the people who
loved the various fantasy series that I wrote for Del Rey in the
1980s and ‘90s, really liked the characters. I liked those
characters too, and I missed writing about them.

Thus, in 2009 I opened a corner of my website
and started selling stories about what happened to these characters
after the closing credits rolled on the last novel of each
series.

The Darwath series centers on the Keep of
Dare, where the survivors of humankind attempt to re-build their
world in the face of an ice age winter, after the destruction of
civilization by the Dark Ones. Ingold the Wizard is assisted by two
stray Southern Californians, Gil Patterson - a historian who is now
part of the Keep Guards - and Rudy Solis, in training to be a
mage.

The Unschooled Wizard stories involve the
former mighty-thewed barbarian mercenary Sun Wolf, who finds
himself unexpectedly endowed with wizardly powers. Because the evil
Wizard King sought out and killed every trained wizard a hundred
years ago, Sun Wolf has no teacher to instruct him in his powers.
With his former second-in-command, the warrior woman Starhawk, he
must seek one - and hope whatever wizard he finds isn’t evil,
too.

In the Winterlands tales, scholarly
dragonslayer John Aversin and his mageborn partner Jenny Waynest do
their best to protect the people of their remote villages from
whatever threats come along: dragons, bandits, fae spirits, and
occasionally the misguided forces of the distant King.

Antryg Windrose is the archmage of the
Council of Wizards in his own dimension, exiled for misbehavior -
meddling in the affairs of the non-mageborn - to Los Angeles in the
1980s (that’s when the novels were written). He lives with a young
computer programmer, Joanna Sheraton, and keeps a wary eye on the
Void between Universes, to defend this world from whatever might
come through.

Though out of print, all four of these series
are available digitally on-line.

To these have been added short stories about
the characters from the Benjamin January historical mystery series,
set in New Orleans before the Civil War. As a free man of color,
Benjamin has to solve crimes while constantly watching his own back
lest he be kidnapped and sold as a slave. New Orleans in the 1830s
was that kind of town. In the novels he is assisted by his
schoolmistress wife Rose, and his good-for-nothing white buddy
Hannibal; two of the four Further Adventures concerning January are
in fact about what Rose does while Benjamin is out of town.

I have always been an enthusiastic fan of the
Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. Over the years I
have been asked to contribute stories to various Sherlock Holmes
anthologies, and when the character went into Public Domain, I
added these four stories to my collection.

Quest For Glory
is a stand-alone, a
short piece I wrote for the program book at a science fiction
convention at which I was Guest of Honor.

Sunrise on Running Water
is tenuously
connected to the Don Simon Ysidro vampire series, in that Don Simon
makes a brief cameo appearance. After seeing the movie
Titanic
- and reflecting that the doomed ship departed from
Ireland after sunset and sank just as dawn was breaking…and that
vampires lose their powers over running water - I just
had
to write it. It’s the only story that’s more about the idea than
about the characters.

The Further Adventures are follow-ons to the
main novels of their respective series. They can be read on their
own, but the Big Stuff got done in the novels: who these people
are, how they met, what the major underlying problems are in their
various worlds. I suppose they’re a tribute to the fact that for me
- and, it seems, for a lot of fans - these characters are real, and
I at least care about what happens to them, and what they do when
they’re not saving the world. They’re smaller issues, not
world-shakers: puzzle-stories and capers.

Life goes on.

Love goes on.

Everyone continues to have Further Adventures
for the rest of their lives.

*

Novels in the Benjamin January Series (some
are available in print, earlier books are out of print but
commercially available digitally)

A Free Man of Color

Fever Season

Graveyard Dust

Sold Down the River

Die Upon a Kiss

Wet Grave

Days of the Dead

Dead Water

Dead and Buried

The Shirt On His Back

Ran Away

Good Man Friday

Crimson Angel