But he wasn’t mung, and he wondered, for the first time: had it been too much? Had he made him uncomfortable? It’d been easy, back then, back when he’d been himself. Back when he’d worn the face he knew, back when he’d known who he was. Now, he thought about what he reckoned Jean De Silver must’ve seen – sitting across the table from Anatole Vauquelin, his lined face flushed with too much whisky, drawling out fumbling attempts to be funny and charming. He pictured himself like that, like he must’ve really looked. Felt his skin crawling –
He didn’t have much time to dwell on it. The half-Gioran snorted his Neverbetter at his toast, a sloppy sort of laughter, teary-eyed, the kind you got out of someone who wasn’t expecting to laugh. Tom couldn’t help it; he laughed, too, soft and a little relieved. It’d always eased something inside him, making someone else laugh.
And Jean had his cigar back in his mouth, and he was grinning, and he was listening intently. It was Tom’s turn to be rapt when the kov started throwing around monic blackstops; he found himself wondering, again, just how much Jean shared with this sister of his, despite all his protests. He was wondering, too, at the luck of meeting a kov like this in some watering hole in the Stacks.
Well, they were both gamblers, and he reckoned they were both taking a gamble. Tom grinned at the question, laughed at Robart’s baffled reply. Sounds like something I’d’ve said a year ago. Has it really been less than a year?
“That’s a hell of a way of looking at it.” He raised his brows and took a drag, blowing out a thoughtful plume of smoke. “You’re quite the open-minded gentleman, Jean. You know, I reckon –” He shot a grin at Robart, before meeting Jean’s eye again. “We gollies think we know everything about magic and the mona, but – there’s a hell of a lot more inexplicable than there is explicable, eh?”
At the word ghost, Tom felt a little thrill of danger. Gambling, he thought again, his smile warming. “I suppose I do,” he said after a moment, sitting back with his smoke. “Mean ghosts, that is. Or, uh – whatever it is we call ghosts. Monic imprints, echoes. But you’re right on the mark.”
Maybe Jackson Robart was too drunk to be unsettled; maybe it was too bizarre and baffling. He was sitting quiet-like now, listening, a bemused expression on his worn face.
Tom sat up in his seat, ashing his cigar. “A relevant book, you said?” He met Jean’s eyes through the drifting smoke. “I wouldn’t want to impose, but I’d be grateful.”
The seeking of knowledge is always laudable, he’d said. Oes, Tom liked him. Maybe Jean should’ve been a professor; not that Tom knew much about it, but he reckoned he’d’ve been a good one.