In the fading light he followed the shadowers, whose increasingly fresh prints had shifted to single file. When he passed the outlying houses of the village, he dismounted and began leading his drooping horse.
Curiosity and thirst: Lightning Season had set in hard, the two streams he’d crossed since morning dried up. He was wondering whether to find the Marlovans to report what he’d seen or seek water for the horse when the animal tensed, ears twitching.
Quill paused between an ancient, spreading oak in full leaf and an old round cottage built in the Iascan style, door on the opposite side from where he stood. He threw the reins over a branch and cut across the kitchen garden, leaping soundlessly from stepping stone to stepping stone until he reached the rough stone wall.
He peered out into a dusky yard—and stilled when he recognized Prince Connar strolling slowly toward an isolated cottage, with what looked like a bottle in hand. Quill was about to turn away—the prince was obviously seeking some kind of entertainment, none of his affair—but his ears caught the soft tick and rustle of stealthy movement, carried on the still air.
Quill glanced at his horse, who sidled and huffed. The animal didn’t like stealth of any sort: rabbits, a bird taking flight from the grass. Quill slid his hands into his sleeves, closing his fingers around the hilts of his knives—and caught the movement of a shadow on the roof of the bakehouse adjacent to the cottage Connar moved toward, and a soft rustle in the shrub on the other side of the road. Then he saw a third shadow slipping alongside the neighboring cottage, the golden glow from a window glinting on naked steel.
Quill bolted across the ground, knives out—and the night exploded into shouts and the gleam of torchlight on swords as two attackers closed in from either side. Quill leaped, whirled, and took them both out, left hand strike, right hand back swing in The Falcon Turns, practiced thousands of times. He whirled toward the third.
From the shadows two men with curve-tipped Marlovan swords landed on Quill’s target.
Quill wrenched himself to a halt, staring blankly at Connar, who stood a couple of paces away.
It was a trap. And the assassins Quill had just attacked had fallen into it.
The belated observation struck Quill’s mind, leaving him feeling bewildered and not a little foolish.
Connar glanced down at the live prisoner pinned down by his two swordsman, a burly man dressed all in black, a black mask concealing his face. The prisoner struggled mightily in the gripping hands.
“Keep him alive,” Connar said, and the two swordsmen stepped on the prone man’s arms as they sheathed their swords.
Connar turned to Quill, the afterimage of that sudden lethal strike still vivid in his eye. “Where did you come from?”
Quill saluted, bloody knife pressed to his chest, as he said, “I’ve been shadowing them since I saw prints hunting a Marlovan party. Caught sight of you just now.”
Connar said, “And came to the rescue.” His teeth flashed in a sudden smile. “As it happens, the dog scouts discovered them shadowing us a week ago.” He kicked the side of the still-writhing would-be assassin. “So we set up a little trap. I appreciate your stooping like a hawk out of the sky, but I’m glad you didn’t reach this one, as we very much wanted at least one alive long enough to answer a few questions.”
“Right,” Quill said, thirst and the violent shift from urgency to bewilderment intensified the aftershock of awareness: he had just killed two living beings.
Connar was silent, still smiling. The rest of his men stood about in a half circle around their prisoner.
As Quill fought against the black spots swimming at the edges of his vision, he became aware that Connar’s circle was not just standing there, they were waiting. For? Me to leave so they can get on with their interrogation.
Sure enough, Connar said, “Quill, why don’t you go get some well-deserved liberty time?”
Though it was spoken as a suggestion, even a friendly one, it was an order, and Quill was relieved to go. His entire body shook with reaction as he retreated to where he’d left his horse. He knelt to clean his knives with handfuls of grass, fighting a violent surge of revulsion as his eyes, his hands, experienced the echo of those killing slashes. His mind fought back, offering justification—defense—what he’d been trained to do—but the two figures sprawled in death, one with wide eyes staring up at a night sky he would never again see remorselessly imprinted on his inner eye.
He fought back the nausea as he sheathed the knives, loosed the horse, and walked him into the village, which glowed with lamplight.
There wasn’t far to go. The village did boast an inn. The horse was soon stabled and Quill sat in a tiny, stifling room directly over the noisy taproom where he could hear the roar of voices going on about the evening’s excitement.
Tired as he was, he couldn’t sleep. His thoughts bent toward Lineas, but he recoiled from seeking solace there, rather than risk throwing her back in memory to what she’d endured at Chalk Cliffs.
Perhaps he ought to find Connar and report what he knew, but again he hesitated. Connar had been waiting for him to leave. He clearly had either orders or an objective, neither of which Quill could, or should, interfere with without orders from the king. Which he didn’t have. Likewise Quill was outside Connar’s chain of command: the letter he carried was for the king. There were few actual facts to report, other than Thias Elsarion’s name, the rest being conjecture. Maybe it would be better to try on his own to answer some of the questions before he reached the king, and could furnish a more useful report.
Yes, that was where duty lay.
Back in the clearing, Connar was still gripped by that vision of Quill leaping, robes flying, steel in either hand striking true. He recognized the visceral thrill of attraction driving the admiration, and snuffed it hard like a candle. Early on he’d decided against the royal runners as prey for play because they talked too much, and he saw no reason to change. Instinct said this one in particular was dangerous.
He blinked away the image, and breathed against the physical reaction, then gestured to a pair of Stick’s scouts, who stretched the would-be assassin out on the ground, arms pinned wide. A third scout cut away the mask, his knife scoring the prisoner’s face from jaw to temple.
Connar hunkered down at their prisoner’s side, a knife held loosely in his fingers. Lantern light outlined his profile, gleaming in his eyes. “Talk or bleed,” he invited.
The man gave a violent heave in a desperate attempt to free himself, for he knew what was coming next. He’d done it to prisoners himself, as excruciatingly as possible, to prolong the fun.
But Connar’s men, every one of them still angry over the destruction of Halivayir, held firm: bootheels ground the prisoner’s wrists into the dirt.
He sagged. “I’ll talk,” he said, fast and surly. “Yenvir says he owes us nothin’ so I figure I owe him nothin’.”
“Oh?” Connar said, sitting back on his heels. But he didn’t sheathe the knife.
The captured man knew who Connar was, having shadowed him for weeks before Midsummer, and again—more prudently, due to the scouts and their dogs—more recently. He stared up at that handsome face, the slight smile and steady, merciless gaze, and decided his only hope of survival was to make himself indispensable to the Marlovans. “Yenvir’s teamed up with Prettyboy over the mountain. We’re the decoy, see.”
“Decoy?”
“Yenvir wants you dead. Your scalp will net a man a thousand Sartoran golden wagonwheels. Your brother, two thousand.”
Connar recoiled in disbelief. “The Skunk wants my scalp?”
The scouts muttered in disgust, and one spat noisily right next to the prisoner’s ear. The man snarled, grunting in a muscle-popping effort to free himself, but the scouts stamped down with their heavy soled, high-heeled riding boots. A bone cracked in the prisoner’s right hand, and the man howled.
Connar lifted his knife to stay the scouts. “Not yet,” he said. “Let’s give our friend
here a chance to tell us what Yenvir wants with our scalps.”
“Proof,” the man’s voice was high and husky, the lantern light shining on his sweaty forehead. “That you’re really dead. So we collect our reward. And then he can send it on to the king, see, with a threat.”
Connar leaned over, speaking in a low, intimate tone. “And yet you said you are a decoy. From what?”
“I don’t know where Prettyboy is—”
“Does he have a name?”
“That’s what we call him. Says he has his own men. Don’t know nothin’ more. Our job is to nail you.” He saw in Connar’s face that the truth had condemned him, and as Connar started to rise, he rushed his words. “I can help you! I’ll show you where Yenvir camps, see—”
“We already know that.” Connar glanced at the scout poised at the prisoner’s head, lifted his chin, and the waiting scout cut the prisoner’s throat.
A gasp and the hisses of whispers from the background recalled the villagers, who had crept out of their houses to goggle.
Connar looked down at the dead man, whose face had gone slack above the obscene black mark at his throat. No spell for Disappearance came to him, though the death was not by his hand. How could this magic possibly know that it was at his unspoken command? Uncertainty gripped him, a brief sense of visceral dread, which he shook off. “We’re done here.”
A stout bald man in the undyed linen of a healer stepped out of the crowd. “I will see to the fallen,” he said flatly.
Connar flicked out his palm, handing the matter over. The assassin had come to kill him for gold. Connar did not regret ordering his death, and yet the magic of Disappearance not coming disturbed him. It was that implication that some unimaginable...something...might be watching, somehow. Some incompetent something, or why did assassins get away with their trade at all? The idea of being observed was so repellent that he gave in to instinct and moved away, gesturing to Stick, still holding back the rest of the gawkers with his sword.
“Let’s go,” Connar said. “New orders.”
He needed the time to think. The assassin’s words had brought back Cousin Tanrid’s doubts about Connar’s suggested reward for finding or killing any of those damned Bar-whatevers. That had been bothering him ever since.
He knew people lied. He’d been lied to. He lied when he felt he had to. Given how easy it was to lie, he couldn’t be certain of any claim outside of dragging a rotting corpse along as proof. No one would do that anymore than he wanted to see it done. But hair—given the target was recognizable by their hair—that was practical.
As soon as he reached their camp, he motioned his captains around. “I want a wing to bring down Yenvir the Skunk. Bring back his scalp.”
Some captains shifted from foot to foot, others side-eyed one another.
Stick’s jaw dropped. “His scalp?”
Connar held up his hand “The assassin we just caught was ordered by Yenvir to bring my scalp, so that it could be brought before the king. Probably along with some sort of threat. Which do you think would have the most effect on him?”
He could see them considering that. Then one of his newer captains said, “Why does it have to be his scalp? Why not his hair?”
“I imagine it’s because a scalp keeps it together.” Stick grimaced. “Or you’d get hair all over before you even reached whoever you had to hand it off to.”
Connar said, “Assuming we can find out who and where this Prettyboy is, how effective do you think it will be to offer him Yenvir’s skunk-striped hair, with or without the scalp?”
A reflective silence met that.
“In fact,” Connar said slowly. “What if that distinctive hair was hanging from, say, your helms as you rode against them, like a real horsetail?”
“Damn.” Stick uttered a crack of laughter. “We should go back there and cut the hair off that big assassin before they ghost him.”
Connar struck his hand away in negation. “No. We can take a lesson from Yenvir, who apparently wanted to brandish my scalp, and Noddy’s if he could get it, before the throne. It’ll be more effective if we employ their own ruse.”
Stick uttered an angry laugh. “Especially recognizable.”
This time everyone agreed, or kept silent if they didn’t.
Connar smiled around at them. Stick laughed again, because the prince he followed was shaping up to be a great commander, because he had orders that he relished.
Connar grinned back. “Decide who’s going, and ride out at sunup,” handing off command to Stick. “The rest of us on to Ku Halir.”
A single rider trained for speed is usually faster than a group. Quill reached Ku Halir first, knowing that Connar would soon arrive behind him. Driving himself to his limits bought him relative distance from the aftereffects of having killed two men. He had duty, and that required him to get as many questions answered as he could, so if the prince wanted a report he could have it before Quill rode down to the royal city.
He turned his horse over to the garrison stable, drank three dippers of water, then claimed one of the small rooms set aside by runners. The room was airless and stifling. It contained nothing but a narrow cot. Quill shut the door, sat down, and wrote to Ivandred, the older royal runner ferret who had been his father’s favorite.
The answer came back before Quill could decide whether to get a meal or a bath first. Instead of a report, Ivandred responded with a makeshift Destination.
A spike of disappointment gave way to resignation. Ivandred was as little given to irrelevant gabbing as Lnand. If Ivandred felt he had more to say than could be written in a quick report, Quill had better endure the transfer to hear it.
He made certain he had the relevant papers tucked into the inner pocket of his robe, and did the magic.
Judging by the dramatic wrench out and back into the world, Ivandred was at some distance from Ku Halir. The man sat on a narrow bed in what appeared to be an attic room, judging by the slant in the ceiling at either side. He had shut the tiny window, rendering the room stifling; the weather this far north, closer to the belt of the world, was even hotter than Ku Halir, though not quite as dry.
Still fighting transfer reaction, Quill withdrew the papers and handed them over. As the transfer reaction wrung through Quill in diminishing pangs of nausea, Ivandred read rapidly through Lineas’s summary of the Idegan king’s warning, then he turned to the sketch. His bushy brows shot upward under his sweat-spangled dome forehead. Quill noticed distractedly that Ivandred, who had always seemed ageless, was balding, the rest of his frizzy hair gone gray.
“I know this young man,” Ivandred said, tapping the backs of his fingers against the drawing. “He’s a silk merchant, very new to the trade. Friendly, likes to chat. Through here every season, coming west with wagons full of silk bolts, well-guarded.”
Quill said, “Nothing they said at Ku Halir indicated he dealt in silk.” He summarized what had happened, before ending with, “Did he ever offer to unroll a length to sell in your presence?”
“No, and I never thought to ask. He didn’t seem the least suspicious. No weapons or threat.”
“Unless they were wrapped in the silk,” Quill said—which was a useless guess.
Ivandred’s thick gray caterpillar brows met over his nose as he reread Lineas’s letter. Then he mopped his face with a handkerchief, and frowned into the middle distance, shifted on his stool, then said, “Listen, here’s why I asked you to come. It’s the news about the attack, which just reached me. Made me look again at my tally. I hadn’t seen this pattern over the weeks and even months, but, well, most of the merchants, tinkers, and tradesmen have been going west and staying, many saying as they go through that word has gone out all along the coast that Idego is now prosperous and promising for trade. And...well, it just occurred to me now, but your silk merchant, or whoever he is, might be part of this pattern. At least, he always has different caravan guards around his carts each time.”
Quill said, “When you say
traders and caravan guards, are they men?” He hated asking, because he suspected he’d hate the answer. “So you’re thinking that this stream of enterprising tinkers and so forth might be something besides traders and artisans?”
Ivandred reached behind the bed, and tapped a square in the rough wall. A tiny hinged door swung open. He pulled out a book, and leafed through the closely written pages, then pointed a long, bony finger at columns. “All going west. Few of them coming through going east again. See what you think.”
Neat columns in Ancient Sartoran recorded the date, the profession, and a brief description of everyone passing down the narrow gorge beneath the cobbler’s shop where Ivandred worked at weaving treated and dyed leddas into boots and shoes.
Quill paged back over the years since the king had withdrawn his new army from riding the Nelkereth further south. Ivandred counted up the men whose descriptions put them between eighteen and thirty. Each year the number had jumped exponentially, always in twos and threes, but arriving ever closer together—always going west, but not as many returning, and those who returned numbered women, older men, children with their families.
Even if a proportion of those moving westward were real traders, the number of young men far outstripped all other groups several times over. Most of these young men had driven wagons full of barrels and bolts and bales with non-military labels.
Quill met Ivandred’s pained gaze. “I think we’ve been snowed.”
There was no point in reminding each other that they had no authority to stop and search the wagons. Ivandred knew he should have spotted the pattern long ago, and figured out a way to check. Quill knew that he should have gone to Ivandred for a report earlier. But no one had suspected such a ruse—if it was a ruse. It would take not only planning over years, but a vast sum of money. Which a wealthy young noble next rank from a prince could compass, if he were as clever as he was ambitious.
Time of Daughters II Page 21
