"Lester Tate?" I asked. "Like in Denny Tate's uncle Lester?"

"Yes."

"It's beginning to come back. The family picnic at Elephant Rocks three years ago. I came with Denny." Maybe I had laundered my memory because Rose had been an unspeakably nasty wench that day. "Maybe it was all the hardware that made me forget your faces." Denny Tate and I went back about eight years, but I hadn't seen him in months. "So how is Denny?" I asked, maybe a little guilty.

"Dead!" barked sweet sister Rose.

Denny Tate and I were heroes of the Cantard Wars. That means we did our five years and got out alive. A lot of guys don't.

We went in about the same time, were barracked less than twenty miles apart, but never met till later, here in TunFaire, eight hundred miles from the fighting. He was light cavalry out of Fort Must. I was Fleet Marines, mostly aboard the Imperial Kimmswick out of Full Harbor. I fought in the islands. Denny rode over most of the Cantard, chasing or running away from the Venageti. We both made sergeant before we got out.

It was a nasty war. It still is. I like it better now that it's much farther away.

Denny saw more of the worst than I did. The fighting at sea and in the islands was sideshow stuff. Neither we nor the Venageti wasted wizards on it. All the flash and fury of sorcery got saved for the struggle on the mainland.

Anyway, we'd both survived our five, and had done part of them in the same general area, and that had given us something in common when we met. It was good enough till we got to know one another.

"So that's why you're a walking arsenal. What is it? A vendetta? Maybe you'd better get inside."

Rose cackled like a hen laying a square egg.

Uncle Lester laughed too, but it was a laugh of a different breed. "Shut up, Rosie. I'm sorry, Mr. Garrett. The weapons are here to feed Rosie's hunger for drama. She believes we don't dare enter this neighborhood unarmed lest the local thugs ravish her."