Aggar didn’t answer immediately. If he admitted that he’d been against the marriage, his disapproval would constitute a grave insult to the Toldoraths, the Tordannons’ oldest allies, and would have repercussions far beyond this room and this trial.
“I had hoped Orin might marry into a family with roots a little closer to home. He is my favorite nephew, after all. I like having him around.” Aggar’s attempt to inject some levity into the proceedings was met with cold silence, and the grin that had been playing halfheartedly about the corners of his lips fled in disgrace.
“Ah, yes. Your favorite. He’s also your heir, is he not? Whom you formally designated in the Ceremony of Steel and Stone?”
All traces of humor vanished from Aggar’s face.
“He is,” the red-haired dwarf replied tightly.
Once a dwarf had formally designated an heir—one step short of full adoption into a clan—he could never revoke the bequest, regardless of whether or not he later had a child of his own. And regardless of what the heir so designated chose to do with that bequest—like allowing it to fall into the hands of another clan by marrying outside of his own.
It was a choice few dwarves made, unless they were trying to keep their legacy out of the hands of an existing heir with a stronger claim. Since Aggar had no children, and was still young enough for that not to be a concern to anyone except Kiruk, his designation of an heir was exceedingly strange and was bound to invite unwanted questions.
As if reading Sabira’s mind, Anneka Soldorak piped up.
“Why would an unmarried dwarf in his prime take the unusual step of designating an heir?”
But Sabira was ready for the dwarf woman. Before Aggar could answer, she stood, purposefully noisy, drawing all eyes to her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Rockfist’s face go purple as he began scribbling furiously on his papers—no doubt trying to warn her of some sacred barrister’s protocol she was about to break. Sabira ignored him; she knew how to handle Anneka.
“With all due respect, Councilor Soldorak, I must ask that you limit your questioning to matters that directly pertain to the charges at hand. Since Aggar’s choice of an heir has no bearing on this trial, we’ll need to save any speculation we might have as to his reasons for the drawing room.”
Sabira’s intimation that the dwarf woman was a gossip aroused by the prospect of a juicy new rumor was not lost on either her or the rest of the Council, and a titter sounded from the Doldarun end of the dais. Anneka’s broad nose crinkled in response and her lips—never generous to begin with—pursed into a tight moue.
“Speaking of heirs, though,” Sabira said casually, “how are the twins?”
Anneka’s twin daughters were widely thought to have been the next on Nightshard’s list of targets, after Aggar. Sabira’s killing of the assassin had almost certainly spared the girls’ lives, and accordingly, Anneka owed the Marshal more than just her thanks—a fact she had no qualms about reminding the dwarf woman of now.
“They’re fine,” Anneka replied shortly, sitting back in her seat and crossing her arms in front of her, trying not to look petulant and failing miserably. When it was clear she had nothing more to say, Torlan cleared his throat.
“Well, my questions do have a bearing on this case, so, if you’ll allow me …?” the arbiter asked with exaggerated courtesy. Sabira gestured for him to continue and retook her seat.
Torlan stroked his beard for a moment, feigning deep thought, and Sabira wondered if the dwarf had trained at some point to be a bard. He certainly had a talent for acting.
“Now, where were we? Oh, yes. For whatever reason, you’ve designated Orin Mountainheart as your heir. So, if—Kol Korran forbid!—anything were to happen to you, he would inherit the bulk of your holdings,” Torlan mused, tapping his finger against his lips. “And then, if anything were to happen to him, your holdings would transfer to his wife. Whose family is affiliated with the Toldoraths. That would change the balance of power in the south quite a bit, I imagine.”
Sabira was on her feet again in an instant.
“Was there a question in there somewhere?” she asked sharply, though Aggar appeared unruffled. But appearances aside, he had to know how damaging Torlan’s line of questioning was.
The arbiter smiled indulgently at her.
“Patience, Shard Axe. I’m getting to it.”
He turned back to Aggar.
“In fact, I would think you would do anything in your power to prevent that from happening. You’d want to stop the wedding, but you couldn’t risk doing anything that might alienate your designee. So you’d approach the priest who was slated to officiate the wedding and try to convince him not to go through with it. And when he refused, you would … do what? Threaten him? Injure him?” Torlan paused for the briefest moment before bringing the argument home with devastating effect. “Maybe even … kill him?”
Aggar responded before the muttering from the Council could rise to an audible level.
“I might do those things,” he said with a nonchalant shrug, “but I didn’t. Orin and Gunnett were married, and Deepshaft was the celebrant. His death did nothing to stop the wedding from taking place. Killing him after the fact would have been pointless.”
“Revenge often is.”
Before Aggar could answer, several things happened at once. A commotion sounded behind the double doors—Sabira could barely make out any words, but she was certain she heard her name and Aggar’s. At the same time, Dorro stepped forward, her face tense with alarm.
“The woman—” she began, pointing, but it was too late.
The veiled dwarf had risen from her seat, unnoticed, and drawn a handheld crossbow from within her ermine-trimmed robes. As she flung the mourning veils out of her face, Sabira finally got a look at her, and, by the gasps that rang through the chamber, she wasn’t the only one surprised by the woman’s identity.
It was Tiadanna Mroranon, Torlan’s wife.
“Your revenge might have been pointless, Tordannon, but mine won’t be!” she snarled as she took aim at Aggar and pulled back the trigger.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mol, Nymm 16, 998 YK
Krona Peak, Mror Holds.
Sabira reacted without thinking. She spun, snatched the long-handled knife off the stunned Narathun’s belt, and threw.
She wasn’t aiming for Tiadanna but rather for the compact crossbow in the dwarf woman’s hand. If she could just knock the weapon from Tiadanna’s grip, the bolt would go wide, shattering harmlessly against the stone wall.
But she wasn’t fast enough. Tiadanna loosed the bolt an instant before the knife sank deep into the back of her hand, passing through flesh and muscle to pin the stock of the crossbow to her palm.
Twin screams reverberated through the chamber then, one Tiadanna’s, and the other Dorro’s.
The perceptor, the only one close enough to reach Aggar, had flung herself at the Tordannon heir, knocking him out of the way of the missile. Unfortunately, the heroic act placed her squarely within the bolt’s path. It struck her in the side of the head, and she was dead before she hit the floor, her echoing scream lingering long after she’d drawn her last breath.
“Dorro!” Jhuddona shouted, rushing to the other priestess’s side, while Torlan leaped from his throne and raced to his wife, followed closely by Kiruk and the two dais guards.
Just then, one of the doors swung open and Gunnett hurried in, trailing water from her gray rain-cloak. She surveyed the room, taking in the chaotic scene: Two women on the floor, the Council members on their feet, and the guards along the walls with their weapons drawn. Then her eyes alighted on Sabira and she strode quickly down the aisle to where the Marshal stood next to Aggar and Rockfist, just outside the circle of Aureon’s sigil. On her way, she sidestepped the gnome—who must be a court recorder and not a chronicler, after all, or else she’d be in the thick of things, scribbling madly instead of cowering behind the dubious cover of a stone bench.
“Sabira,�
�� she said, handing the Marshal a letter sealed with the Deneith chimera. “Your captain asked me to give you this.”
Sabira broke the seal on the letter and scanned it quickly. Written in Elix’s familiar script, the letter was vague and seemingly innocuous, but it still managed to fill her with a pervading dread.
T. says the shard is identical to the one from N.’s ring. N. may not have been working alone, and his accomplice may be closer than you think.
Be careful.
E.
PS—I wasn’t lying.
“What does it say?” Aggar asked when he was done introducing his niece-by-marriage to Rockfist and filling her in with a succinct and carefully edited version of what had just happened.
“Nightshard … had an accomplice,” Sabira whispered, unable for a moment to manage anything louder. “This changes everything.”
She looked up from the note, meeting Aggar’s shocked gaze with one of her own.
“We need to talk to Torlan.”
Getting close to the arbiter was easier said than done, however. Torlan was yelling at Jhuddona to come heal his wife; Kiruk was shouting for the guards to arrest her; and the guards themselves, along with the remaining Council members, milled about uncertainly. Sabira started to elbow her way through the small crowd surrounding the Mroranons, only to be stopped by Rockfist.
“Wait a moment,” he cautioned. “I don’t think you want to be in the middle of this.”
Sabira paused, annoyed. The barrister was the one who was getting in the middle of something he didn’t fully understand, and she was about to tell him so in the most scathing terms possible when the volume of noise at the center of the crowd suddenly rose dramatically.
“… a priestess is dead, at her hand! If the mere suspicion of that crime is enough to imprison my son for days on end, how can you possibly justify allowing her to go free? When we all saw her loose the bolt that killed Dorro?” Kiruk’s voice had taken on a thunderous timbre as he railed against Tiadanna. “A bolt, I might add, that was meant for my son! And for what? Because her lover is dead? Is that why you’re so eager to see my son hang for his murder? To mollify her? Or to divert suspicion from yourself? Because if anyone in this room had a reason for wanting that priest dead, it was you!”
Stunned silence followed the Tordannon chief’s outburst, and Sabira turned to look at Rockfist.
“I thought Deepshaft was her cousin …?” she whispered, leaning close so her words wouldn’t carry.
“By marriage,” the barrister murmured back. “They’d been having an affair for the past year. At least according to all that ‘local gossip’ you hold in such disdain,” he added with a self-satisfied smile.
Sabira probably deserved that. She might even owe him an apology, but it would have to wait. She’d get no better opening to speak to Torlan than this.
“Your pardon, Councilor Mroranon,” she said loudly into the silence, pushing her way past a gaggle of guards. The other Council members parted to let her through—no doubt unwilling to risk being in close proximity when Torlan unleashed his wrath on her and the target she so conveniently presented. Except that the arbiter wasn’t going to want her head on a pike after he heard what she had to say. Quite the contrary.
“I realize the timing is inopportune, but I’ve just received word from Sentinel Marshal headquarters in Vulyar. We have another suspect for the murders, and you’ll be relieved to know it isn’t you.”
Torlan’s face was a mask of fury and for a moment Sabira thought she might have overplayed her hand. The arbiter looked angry enough to strangle someone with his bare hands, and her death might well have fewer repercussions for him than Kiruk’s. Then Sabira’s words seemed to register, and his anger gradually cooled, though it never quite left the corners of his eyes or the curve of his mouth. There would be bad blood between Mroranon and Tordannon from this day forward, Sabira knew, but she couldn’t save the whole clan. She wasn’t even sure she could save Aggar, though the information Tilde had uncovered should help with that.
The arbiter put his arm around his wife, who was still bleeding from the knife wound in her hand. Sabira did her best to focus on Torlan and ignore the look of pure hatred on the dwarf woman’s face. When neither of the Mroranons spoke, Sabira took that as tacit permission to continue.
“These murders bear the same signature as those committed by Nightshard seven years ago. Since there was never any indication back then that the assassin had a partner, then it was logical to assume that whoever was doing the killing this time around must have had intimate knowledge of those previous murders, since the exact manner of death was never released to the chroniclers—only the investigators and members of the victims’ families had that information. That yielded a very small suspect pool, which the Inquisitives assigned to the case were further able to whittle down when it became clear that only one person in that group had had contact with all the victims: Aggar Tordannon. But the only reason he ever came under suspicion in the first place was because we all assumed Nightshard had been working alone. We now have reason to believe that assumption was wrong.”
She had the entire Council’s attention now. Though the assassinations had ultimately been limited to only the southern holds, they all remembered the fear they had felt during Nightshard’s reign of terror, wondering if their clan, their children, would be next.
Surprisingly, it was a calm Kiruk who answered her.
“You said the Marshals have another suspect, aside from my son? Who is it?”
“We don’t have a name yet, but we believe he is hiding out in the vicinity of Frostmantle.” She had nothing on which to base that assumption, save for the fact that it was where the first and most anomalous of this new rash of murders had occurred. But she’d been involved in a handful of serial murderer cases before, and often the first victim yielded the most clues to the killer’s identity. And, unfounded or not, it was the best lead she had at the moment. She had to give them something besides a dragonshard imbedded in a yrthak’s skull. “That’s why I need to get there as soon as possible and track him down. If he is the real killer, who’s to say he’ll be satisfied with stopping at thirteen victims?”
“But wasn’t your whole defense going to be predicated on the argument that Aggar was framed?” It was Anneka this time; Torlan remained inexplicably silent. “If Nightshard did have an accomplice, why would he suddenly be more interested in setting up Tordannon than in simply finishing the job he and Nightshard started?”
“To have you do his dirty work for him,” Sabira answered, warming to her theory. “Aggar was the victim that got away. If Nightshard’s accomplice has been obsessing over that failure all this time, he wouldn’t just want to kill Aggar, he’d want to see him humiliated first. What better way than to have him tried by this court and found guilty? Maybe even declared clanless?” Sabira didn’t really think Kiruk would go that far of his own accord, but there was more than his son’s reputation at stake here. If he had to choose between protecting his beloved son and protecting the honor of his clan, what choice would he really have? Much as in her own House, the whole mattered more than any of its individual parts. Better to declare Aggar clanless than to have him take the entire clan down with him.
“But framing Aggar for thirteen murders … that seems like a lot of work just to sully the Tordannon name,” Anneka said dubiously. “Why not just kill him and be done with it?”
“I doubt he intended to have to kill so many others; it just took that long—and the murder of a priest—before Aggar was apprehended. As for why—I think you’re underestimating the allure of inflicting so much damage on the Tordannons; a murder conviction for Aggar would cripple them. And, frankly, it’s no further than, say, Londurak would go to bring Laranak down a notch.” Before either of those two clan leaders could protest, Sabira moved on.
“It’s possible Aggar isn’t even the ultimate target of all these machinations. We thought, back then, that Nightshard was choosing his victims
not for themselves but to get at their parents and their families. What better way to destroy Kiruk than to kill his only child and weaken his clan, with one terrible blow?”
“So now we’re to believe these murders are actually some sort of elaborate attack against Kiruk?” Hilgg Narathun asked, her tone skeptical and impatient. “Make up your mind, Marshal.”
“Why now?” Torlan asked, finally breaking his silence. “Why wait so long to exact revenge, if that’s what this is?”
“I don’t know,” Sabira admitted. “Maybe he was there in the cave with Nightshard, and somehow escaped, albeit injured? Perhaps it’s taken him this long to regroup? Or maybe there’s something we don’t yet know about that happened to trigger this rampage. I’m not sure it matters at this point. What does matter is finding him. That’s why I need you to delay this trial—if you still insist on going through with it—for at least another week or two. To give me time to go to Tordannonhold and track him down.”
“No!”
Even Torlan was startled by Tiadanna’s outburst. He dropped his arm from her shoulders and took her uninjured hand, stepping back so he could see her face more clearly.
“Tia, you really shouldn’t—” he began, but she cut him off.
“No, Torlan, you can’t!” she cried, pulling away. “You have no proof that this so-called accomplice even exists! It’s just a ploy to give them more time to come up with a way to get that accursed Tordannon scum out of this. That orc-spawn killed Mikos! You can’t let him get away with it!”
“And you killed Dorro!”
Sabira had been too focused on trying to convince the Council of the accomplice’s existence or she would have noticed Jhuddona making her way from the dead perceptor’s side to the knot of people around the Mroranons. As it was, she was as surprised as anybody when the priestess darted forward to tap Tiadanna on the forehead, muttering some words Sabira couldn’t quite hear.
The Shard Axe: An Eberron Novel (Dungeons & Dragons) Page 19
