After Hours: Tales From Ur-Bar by Joshua Palmatier & Patricia Bray

Author:Joshua Palmatier & Patricia Bray [Palmatier, Joshua & Bray, Patricia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780756406592
Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published: 2011-03-01T11:00:00+00:00

Decades passed. I took an apprentice. When he was killed, I took another. Mere survival was enough to earn me a seat on the council. Later, when my uncle died of apoplexy, no one was more shocked than I to discover that he’d named me his heir.

These days the London branch of the Order consisted of men that I’d trained myself, or who had been apprenticed to one of those that I’d trained. When someone referred to The Harker, it was me that they spoke of. Which was better than my other nickname, The Old Man.

I was past sixty now, a ripe old age for any man, for all I looked barely thirty. There were days when I hated the figure that my mirror revealed, hated the unlined skin that showed no signs of what I had endured.

My wife Mary had died in childbirth decades before, and there were none left in the Order who remembered her. None to recollect the babe who had been sent to the countryside to be raised by distant cousins. The child—or rather man, for surely so he must be—had no notion of what it meant to bear the Harker name. It was the one gift I could give him.

As the years passed and my body refused to age, I withdrew more and more from the world. Members of the Order accepted what the rest of society would not. The burdens of leadership were heavy, and it was only now that I finally understood my uncle. Like him, I was obsessed with both preserving the Order, and ensuring that I found a fitting successor who could take my place.

Samuel Forsythe seemed a likely enough lad. Though lad was perhaps not quite the term, since a stranger seeing us together would presume him the elder. I had left Forsythe in charge in London, while I visited the European outposts of the Order, doing my best to renew ties that had been severed by decades of conflict.

Some of the outposts had been welcoming, others less so, wary that I would use England’s recent military triumphs as an excuse for seizing control. When they discovered I had no intention of trying to exert my will, they’d gradually warmed to me. Not enough to share all of their information, of course. But enough to promise cooperation, and to share those bits that they deemed safe.

It would take years to rebuild the network of alliances, and I knew I wasn’t the man for the task. It was all I could do to force myself out of bed each morning. It had been a relief to leave the chapter house in Geneva behind, and to fall back into the guise of an indolent traveler.

When a chill spring rain started falling, I stopped at the first likely inn, rather than pressing on. I was tired, with a weariness that had sunk into my very bones. I’d seen too much, lost too many good friends, and the prospect of enduring endless decades of the same inspired only dull apathy rather than the righteous fervor I had once commanded.

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