Yosef was just about to head out and check on the men when a beautiful buxom woman came up to him. “Aren’t you a cute one. Let me buy you a drink.”
“You want to buy me a drink?” asked Yosef.
“Yes, unless that is a problem for you?”
“No, ma’am. That would be delightful. My name is Yosef.”
“A pleasure, Yosef. My name is Sherry.”
22
Rogue
“You look like day-old meat after a jackal chewed it, digested it, and crapped it out,” Zeke said as Rogue entered the cabin.
“I feel about the same.” Rogue removed his shirt, revealing the dark blue and purple that covered his midsection and arm.
“Did you forget the salve I sent with you?”
Rogue shook his head. “I used it after the first fight.”
“Damn it, man, how many fights did you get into? It looks like you took on the entire army of Middle Vaton.”
“Two fights,” said Rogue with a sigh. “And not an army. Just a dozen mercenaries in Golrog and a pair of assassins in the mountains.”
“Let me guess, you handled the dozen with ease, but the two almost killed you.”
Rogue nodded. “That’s pretty much how it went down.”
“No surprise there,” Zeke said as he went into the back room and came out with a large container of salve. He started spreading it over Rogue’s wounds. “Large forces of mercenaries and warriors always overestimate the value of their numbers. They talk when they should be attacking. They never train as one, not like you and your Shadow Brigade did. While that pair of assassins, I bet they got the drop on you.”
“Almost had me dead before I knew it was coming,” Rogue said. “Probably would’ve had me if they’d fired a few more arrows before dropping their bows. Or if the light hadn’t hit the blade of the first arrow—I would’ve taken an arrow to the heart instead of the shoulder.”
“’Tis the way of battle. Sometimes you have to be good to be lucky,” Zeke said as he examined Rogue’s torso for any more holes or broken bones. “Your bruises will heal overnight, but it will take a few days for the ribs to heal. You’ll have to take it easy for a while.”
Rogue laughed. “If only I could. I need to leave at first light. I have to get to the Grant estate. There will be more attacks on them and I don’t know if the men Isaac sent will be enough.”
“Since when does Isaac not send the right men for the job? He’s rarely wrong about his men.”
“It isn’t his men that are the problem. It’s how badly someone wants her dead. And how badly someone wants me dead. The assassins who attacked me, someone offered them a man’s weight in gold to kill me.”
“Seven hells,” Zeke exclaimed. “I’d kill you myself for that kind of money.”
Rogue chuckled despite the pain. At least the magic salve was kicking in and the small laugh only hurt a little bit. “We both know you don’t care about money, only pretty horses and your garden.”
“Yes, but think of the horses I could buy with that much money,” Zeke said with a wink.
“Speaking of horses, I spoke with Isaac. He’d like first dibs on any horse that you sell.”
“He would? Well, that shows the man has a brain, unlike some oversized goats I know. I wonder if he has any good horses to trade. Last time I was in Golrog I wasn’t very impressed.”
“They do need good horses,” Rogue said. “If I were you I’d bring up some of those racing horses they breed down in Chambia.”
Zeke frowned. “Racing horses? They’re all legs and speed, too light.”
“Breed them with your mountain horses. That new bay is sturdy.”
Zeke grinned ear to ear. “She is, isn’t she? Did I tell you about her? She’s carrying that devil roan’s foal. The foal will be either the best animal in all of Mara or an evil unrideable beast. Only time will tell.”
“The roan is rideable and it’s the smartest horse I’ve ever owned.”
“When it’s not trying to kill you,” Zeke said.
Rogue smiled. “He has personality, and we understand each other.”
Zeke shrugged. “I suppose. Either way, I’m looking forward to seeing what his offspring ends up like. Perhaps adding a good Chambian mare to the stables wouldn’t hurt.” Zeke looked up at Rogue. “This is it, isn’t it? You’re leaving.”
Rogue nodded. “I think so. I’ve been thinking about home. Once I’ve sorted out this mess with the Grants I’d like to go see my family.”
“About damn time,” Zeke said. “Don’t you worry, I’ll look after the place like it was my own.”
“It is yours, Zeke. The cabin, the horses, and the bag of gold hidden under the kitchen floor. There’s enough there to buy all the horses you want, perhaps even hire someone from Riverside to give you a hand.”
Zeke grumbled and he looked ready to cry, something Rogue had never seen. “The horses are mine? Really?”
“All but the roan. He goes with me.”
“Thank the gods,” Zeke said, wiping away what looked like the start of a tear. “That hammerhead son of a whore would’ve killed me. Thank you, Rogue. You’ve been a good friend.”
Rogue stood up and put his hand on Zeke’s shoulder. “You take care, Zeke. Breed beautiful horses and stay out of trouble. I’m going to get some sleep now. It’s been a long day.”
23
Braylen
Braylen Stone stood at the side of the main house. It was his responsibility to maintain the night watch at the Grant estate. Marcos took care of the Grants’ safety during the daylight hours while he took the night shift.
It was the way Braylen liked it.
The night was the time of assassins and sneak attacks. It was when people were most vulnerable to attack. It was the most important part of guard duty, and Braylen took pride in the fact that he was the best at his job.
Around the perimeter of the estate buildings, Braylen had four sentries. Each walked a path that took him around the estate grounds so that one man was always in each quadrant of the perimeter. Two more sentries sat on the roof of the main house, hidden from sight but listening to the sounds of the night.
Most men thought sight was their most important sense, but for night sentries it was the least important. Other than the first few days while they learned the property, Braylen’s sentries didn’t use torches. They walked in the shadows and moved in stealth. Braylen knew where they were because he knew what to look for, but anyone approaching the estate would find them hard to find. And, with luck, the sentries would hear anyone coming before being spotted. It was a dangerous job, being the first line of defense, but a necessary one.
Hardwick, one of the inside guards, slipped out the front door and silently made his way to where Braylen was standing. He handed Braylen a mug of hot tea and a warm bun.
“Beautiful night,” Hardwick said softly as he stood beside Braylen, looking out into the night sky.
“Yes, it is,” Braylen said.
“So quiet.”
Braylen nodded. Hardwick was right. It was very quiet. Too quiet.
He scanned the areas where he knew the scouts were. From his position, he could only see three of the scouts at any one time, but he’d picked this spot to cover the most likely places of attack.
South of the main house he spotted the sentry and then turned his gaze east. There was no shadow where that sentry was supposed to be. Braylen frowned. It was possible the sentry had stopped to relieve himself or to listen to something. He waited for the sentry to show, but then spotted two shadows where there only should have been one. And they were moving in the wrong direction.
Braylen handed Hardwick the tea. “Get inside. Wake Marcos. Tell him we have guests.”
Hardwick glanced out into the night but could see nothing. He quickly scampered into the main house to find Marcos.
Braylen let out a long wolf howl. From the staff quarters came a return howl, and from the roof came an owl hoot. Braylen smiled in satis
faction. No matter how this night turned out, he and his men were ready. Never let it be said he was unprepared or caught unawares. He issued a sharper whistle this time while raising his bow. He struck the edge of his arrow against the flint built into his boot, and as the oil-soaked arrow burst into flames, he calmly aimed out into the dark towards the near-invisible target and let his arrow fly. He’d practiced the shot enough that he could make it eyes closed in a strong wind. As his arrow found the mark and the sack of oils attached to the tree burst into flames, two more like targets were struck by arrows from the archers on the roof. The explosions lit the night and the outlines of dozens of men could be seen swarming the estate. Whoever wanted Jasmin Grant dead had gone from using a pair of assassins to a full-fledged assault.
Braylen gritted his teeth and started firing arrows at the multitude of targets. Each time he fired an arrow he moved a step to one side or the other. While the outskirts of the yard were basked in light, the main house was still in the shadows. With luck, he could kill dozens of the bastards without being spotted.
An arrow narrowly missed his head.
So much for luck, Braylen thought as he found the archer who’d spotted him and sent an arrow into his chest.
...
Tenga Kalo was furious. He and his men had been hired for the assault on the Grant estate. It had seemed an easy job: sneak across the border into Deytar, attack the Grant estate, kill everyone, then head back home to get the other half of the payment.
Money for old rope, or so he had been led to believe.
As he watched from his vantage point, the sound of his men dropping to the ground with arrows sticking out of them did not make it sound like an easy job. Nobody had mentioned that there were guards on the estate. Nobody had mentioned that there were people there who knew what they were doing and were prepared to defend.
The people who had hired him would hear about that little gem of information in no uncertain terms when he got back to claim his money.
An arrow whistled past him and embedded itself in a tree with a quiver.
If he got back to claim his money.
The men who had hired him were going to be uncomfortable when he saw them next. He cursed them in colorful language, then concentrated on what he had to do to fulfill his part of the bargain.
It took him several minutes to work out who was where, but he thought that he had the beginnings of a plan. The house itself wasn’t fortified. The windows had shutters but the main door, while sturdy, was never going to stand up to a full-on assault. That was where he would concentrate his men.
One of the sentries had already been dealt with and, trying to get into the head of whoever organized the defense, he reasoned there would be another three, one on each side of the house.
The side of the house he was facing held the main entrance. Using hand signals, he instructed his trusted assistant to quietly deploy three archers facing left and three facing right on either side of the route to the door.
Once they were in position, and with a signal from him, the rest of his squad, depleted in numbers by four now, sprinted from the cover they had found to the door, under cover of the barrage of arrows let loose by the archers protecting them.
As he ran by them one of the archers was hit, spinning around with an arrow in his left eye before collapsing, dead before he hit the ground.
“Get those doors open,” he yelled as he got closer, unwilling to leave his men or himself outside at the mercy of the bastards shooting arrows at them from the shadows.
Three of his largest mercenaries ran at the door full pelt and almost fell over when the door shattered into shards on impact.
“Archers guard our escape,” Tenga shouted into the dark night. He watched as the five took cover as best they could, forming a protective semi-circle around the door.
He stepped over the remnants of the door and into the house. Every one of his men had their swords drawn, but there was nothing but silence to behold inside the house. Rising dust shimmered in the dim light the broken door was now allowing in from outside.
It was too quiet.
He used hand signals to get the men to spread out. His instructions were that none in the house should survive, so he didn’t want anyone sneaking out into the dark of the night without at least one of his men spotting them.
It didn’t take long for the stairs to be discovered. A low whistle drew him forward to take a look. The man standing at the bottom of the stairs was grinning as he pointed through a dark frame. His grin disappeared as soon as an arrow forced its way through the flesh of his neck, splashing everyone within ten feet with blood as it slashed open his throat.
He fell in a heap on the floor, the blood slowly subsiding until it was no more than a scarlet trickle across his neck into the gathering pool below.
How in the name of all the gods was he meant to get up there? he thought.
He stalked around the rooms, searching for either another way up or a way of getting up the stairs without his men becoming target practice for whoever was up there.
As he moved slowly around, a plan began to form.
...
The biggest, strongest man from his group stood around the corner from the stairs. On Tenga’s signal, the man hoisted the top that had been taken from the table in the kitchen in front of him and stepped into the stairwell. Within seconds arrows poured down the stairs while more of Tenga’s men followed on behind, slowly climbing as the arrows passed harmlessly above their heads, shielded as they were by the heavy table.
When he reached the top, the strongman had a choice of whether to turn left or right. He glanced back to Tenga for guidance.
Tenga signaled for him to turn right, which, if he was correct, would lead into the bulk of the rooms upstairs.
Fully expecting a rash of arrows from the left, Tenga breathed a sigh of relief that he had chosen well.
The narrow hallways were restricting his ability to press home his attack, but also aiding the defense of his men. He couldn’t be flanked or surprised from behind, especially once some of his men opened up the two rooms behind them. The dying screams of whoever resided in those rooms was music to his ears. He was at least partway to claiming his reward, and now the people left upstairs had no means of escape.
They were trapped like rats up a drainpipe.
He rubbed his hands together, happy for the first time since they’d climbed onto the immediate surrounds of the house.
An arrow ricocheting off the wall, gouging a chunk out of the plaster, brought him back to earth. They still had work to do and he needed to get his men past the defenders.
“Forward,” he yelled.
The man with the table shifted his grip and moved ahead.
Each time they passed a room, two men were sent in to dispatch its occupants until they reached a junction where a corridor branched off to the left.
He instructed the man with the shield to cross directly over and sent half his team with him. The volume of arrows from the other corridor showed him that the key targets were in that direction.
Knowing that he was bound to lose some men, but with no choice now but to use what he thought would be his additional numbers, he instructed his men to attack around the corner.
Nobody moved, the men looking at each other in the knowledge that they hadn’t signed up for what was now a suicide mission at best.
“Mr. Kalo, sir. You’re asking us to get killed going around there. I ain’t going.” A gruff, angry-looking man stood tall amongst the rest. Others muttered indistinctly in support.
Tenga Kalo stepped forward until he stood a matter of feet from the mutineer.
“Say that again.” He slid his short sword from its sheath and focused his eyes on the man’s.
“I said, I ain’t—”
Kalo slashed his throat with one swift, vicious swipe.
The rest of his sentence was a gurgle and a cough as he choked on his own blood. He dropped to his knees, his hand gripping his
neck, unable to stem the flow of blood as it seeped between his fingers. As he paled, he began to tremble, then he dropped his hands and keeled over sideways.
“Anybody else have any objections to doing what I paid you to do?” He eyed each man angrily.
Nobody spoke.
“Right, on my signal.”
Reluctantly the men turned toward the deathtrap corridor.
“One, two, go.”
The first two men sprinted around the corner, followed swiftly by the rest of the squad. Kalo waited until he heard the clash of swords before he followed.
Stepping over dead bodies, he kicked open the doors of both of the two rooms along the corridor. Both were empty. Up front, the remnants of his squad, just three men, were waiting by the door of the bedroom at the end of the corridor.
Inside the room, the badly slashed bodies of two men lay dead, their blood staining the brightly patterned woolen rugs that would have kept bare feet from the cold wooden floor.
One of the men by the door pointed out the window.
The sight of knotted sheets tied to the heavy brass bedstead told him everything he needed to know, but he went and looked anyway. The sheets hung down the outside wall of the house like a long white snake, billowing slightly in the gentle breeze that rustled the leaves on the trees outside with a hiss.
“Go and check on the other team,” he said over his shoulder as he looked out over the gardens and at the two people who were mounting horses just outside the grounds. One man and one woman. As he watched, they galloped away into the night.
He swore under his breath.
“Mr. Kalo?”
He turned quickly, making the young man who was the bringer of tidings flinch and step back. When the trembling man saw he wasn’t about to be attacked, he gulped down his fear and delivered his news.
“Lady Grant is missing. Everyone else who is in the house is dead, but there’s no sign of Princess Jasmin.”
Kalo nodded his thanks and the man scuttled out as quickly as he could. Kalo could hear the thud of his boots down the corridor as he hurdled dead bodies to reach the safety of what was left of his colleagues.
Rogue Page 14
