“My lord, I am honored.”

“But if I had invited you, you would have begged off.”

“Only to see what had been stocked in the storage unit in my chambers.”

Victor laughed. “It was all the food you had in Zurich, still frozen.”

“Ugh.”

“Well, I never go into battle without a reserve, and knowing it would be inedible was another inducement for you to join me.”

“Again, my lord, I am honored.” As I was bidden, I sat at his right hand and we ate happily. At least, I know I was happy. I assumed, based on his smiles and laughter, that he enjoyed things as well.

While there is quite a bit of interaction between Knights of various ranks, and friendships do grow and fade, the kindly interest Victor had taken in me was a bit out of the ordinary. I’m not certain why it was that he took me under his wing, for he recruited me, engineered my education, and guided me to my present role as a Ghost Knight.

Janella has advanced two theories, each of which supports the other. The first is that Victor had lost his son, Burton, and then Isis Marik in relatively short order. The burden of his own mortality had to be upon him, for Kai Allard-Liao and Hohiro Kurita, both powerful contemporaries and close friends, had since passed, leaving him very much alone. Janella thought, in learning about me, Victor had found someone who could be shaped into one more good thing he had done for the universe. I became his hobby.

The problem with that idea was simply that Victor really had no time for hobbies. His duties as a Paladin kept him very busy. His stature within the Inner Sphere meant that he could intervene in situations and calm them almost by just showing up. In his years he had learned so much about what motivated people that he could pick out their weaknesses and desires, then play one off against the other to resolve difficulties.

Her second theory was that I reminded him of someone he’d known. We both rejected the idea that I reminded him of himself, since our backgrounds and natures were completely different. From time to time we searched for candidates who would fill the bill, and found the search fruitless until Janella heard a story about Phelan Kell and his being expelled from the Nagelring on Tharkad. What he’d done to get kicked out was similar to what I’d done to earn Victor’s attention—though Phelan was dealing with ice and I was dealing with fire.

Phelan had gone on to become a member of the Clans and to lead the Wolf Clan into exile on Arc-Royal. There had been tension between the two of them that was later healed as they joined forces to end the Clan war once and for all time. The idea that Victor might have seen me as someone who could hare off as Phelan had, and that he had acted to channel me into more constructive pursuits did bear weight.

And I was lucky that true affection grew up between us.

At meal’s end, Victor led me from the dining room to a small study. There, servants brought both of us snifters with generous dollops of brandy. He relaxed in his favorite chair—a big, overstuffed leather one which the chairs I had aspired to be—and slowly began speaking. Those gray eyes didn’t so much focus distantly as they slowed a bit and let some of their wariness drain away.

“It has been difficult, Mason, to watch this attack on The Republic and not know who is behind it or why. If we could identify them, we could rally the people behind a battle to destroy them. The problem is, just as your friends on Helen came to assume, everyone chooses their own bogeyman to blame for the problems. We can’t fight shadows, and we have been given less than shadows.

“And it hurts to watch Stone’s work teeter on the brink of destruction.” Victor swirled the dark liquid in his snifter, then breathed its vapors in. “Have I ever told you about when I first met Devlin Stone?”

“No, my lord. I’ve read of it in biographies.”

Still staring into the depths of his drink, he smiled. “None of them have gotten it right. I was on Tukkayid, as the Precentor Martial. I was doing all I could to oppose the Word of Blake, but then, as now, things were fragmented and difficult to coordinate. Not only were we getting too much data, but half of it was rubbish. At home Jade was all of three and a half years old, and the twins barely a year. It was chaotic all around.

“Kai’s son, David, had vanished when the Word of Blake attacks took place in ’67, and the first word we’d had of him came in late ’71. I thought it was more Blakist disinformation, because it said David was among a group of warriors who had liberated the world of Kittery from Blakist forces. I passed the information on to Kai reluctantly, but as more word came from that area, more reports mentioned David. They concentrated on this man named Devlin Stone, but ComStar had no records of him at all and, at that time, if ComStar had no records…”

“You didn’t exist.”

“Exactly. Well, early in ’73 we got more news of Stone. It appears he liberated a bunch of worlds around Kittery and set up a ‘prefecture.’ You have to know I immediately thought this man must be some sort of a bandit-king looking to create his own house, but then Kai told me he’d heard from David and that David was extolling Stone’s virtues. I got passed some information about the Kittery Prefecture, all of which looked very good—and I thought it had to be propaganda.”

Victor drank a bit of his brandy, then his eyes flashed at me. “The histories you’ve read glorify Stone, but we had none of that back then. All we had was the raw data about a man who had laid claim to worlds and forged them into a self-supporting unit. He was doing things no government had been able to match. He stepped on toes when he did it, but it was working.

“Through David, Kai arranged for Stone to meet with me. Stone thought traveling to Tukkayid would be a waste of time, but David prevailed upon him and in October of ’73 we met. He was a big man, with dark hair and dark eyes—you’ve met him, but you were looking at him through the eyes of someone who knew what he had done. I was looking at raw potential and knew what he had been forced to do in winning his successes. I was looking at a very dangerous man.”

I shivered. “I’d not thought of it that way.”

“Not many do. Having a kindly profile on coins tends to hide the nature of the subject. Stone was respectful, I’ll give him that, and sat down and told me what he was doing. There was no bragging on what had already been done, and no bragging on what would be done. He was straight and direct with me.

“Mason, down through the years I’d met all sorts and, with few exceptions, these people either wanted me to accept them as a peer right away, or they wanted to curry favor. Both wanted some portion of the power they thought I had, some for good, some for ill, but both groups treated me as a well of power, and most wanted me to give them a bucket to haul some away.

“Stone wasn’t like that. He just told me what he was doing. He didn’t want my approval or help. He just wanted me to be informed so I could decide whether I was going to stop him, or if I was going to get out of his way. And I did think about both of those options, for his reforms were rooted in breaking down and rebuilding some core facets of the way society had functioned for centuries. It was less that he wanted to dip from the well of political power than that he wanted to dig down, find the spring feeding the well, and open that up into a river that would sweep the old order away.”

Victor’s eyes hardened for a moment. “That was a scary thought, and I would have moved to oppose him save that he clearly valued David Lear as a counselor and the changes he was making were changes that needed to be made. Moreover, given the damage the Word of Blake had done, unless there was restructuring, society was going to collapse. There was no chance to return to the way things had been before the attack.”