by Alex Bledsoe
“I’ll tell him you’re pure as the gutter snow.”
“But I am,” I said with a deadpan wink. Hank chuckled and went to get my saddle.
THE gray mare Hank loaned me for the day was a pale, contemptuous shadow of Lola, in both temperament and simple skill. Her trot was much slower, she fought every tug on the reins and when I pulled her to a stop she insisted on pacing in a tight circle for several moments before acquiescing, like a dog preparing for a nap. She wouldn’t even stand still for me to mount her, so by the time we left the stable all my old prejudices against horses had returned.
A preoccupied man bumped into us as we emerged onto the street, which made the mare snort and stamp. I yanked the reins tighter. The man, dressed in the grimy clothes of a miner, glared up at me. “Why don’t you watch where I’m going?”
“Sorry,” I said, and nodded at the horse. “She’s a loaner.”
“I’m not surprised; no other decent horse would be seen with this nag.”
“No, I meant-” But he was already gone, muttering to himself and looking at the ground. I watched him until he disappeared in the crowd; he did nothing suspicious. Mud covered his boots, but they were the wrong style anyway.
I headed up the hill toward the moon goddess hospital. Mother Bennings met me in one of the consulting rooms. Her handsome face creased with concern. “Are you all right? Is there a problem?”
I shook my head. “Mending up nicely. I wanted to ask if the old guy with the gloves had been back.”
“Actually, yes,” Bennings said. “He came by yesterday, after you were released, and-” Suddenly she stopped, and a sly grin split her face. “I never told you about him.”
I smiled. “No.”
“You are a sneaky one,” she chuckled. “And yes, he’s been here again. I talked to him myself.”
“Who is he?”
“He wouldn’t give his name. But he was an odd gentleman. Seemed to be in some sort of chronic pain connected to his hands. I offered to take a look, but he wouldn’t let me. He did say he was glad you were all right.”
“Did he have an accent or anything?”
“Nothing obvious. So it’s no one you know?”
I shook my head. “It doesn’t sound like it.”
“You should also know that a young Captain Argoset from Sevlow asked about you as well. He was much more specific. Wanted to know where you were found, who brought you in, a whole lot of things. Unfortunately, or fortunately as the case may be, I didn’t know. He seemed a bit put off by that.”
“Yeah. We’ve met.”
“Are you somebody important? Is that why he’s here?”
I laughed. “I’m less important than just about anyone you know. I think the dead girl interests him a lot more than I do, only she’s not around to answer any questions. What happened to her body, by the way?”
“We cremated it while you were still unconscious. No one claimed it, and it’s the wrong time of year to keep corpses very long. That didn’t make the captain very happy, either.” She paused. “We gave her a full ritual to help her spirit through the veil. No one should have to make that trip alone.”
I nodded. “Thanks. If anything else interesting happens, would you let me know?”
“Of course. And don’t go out and do anything to reinjure yourself. Everyone here knows how badly you were hurt, so as long as you’re walking around, I look like a great healer.”
On my way out I paused at the main door. Beside it stood a large, long-necked vase covered in symbols of the moon goddess: three women, one a young girl, one a pregnant mother, the last old and stooped. The vase’s practical function was to collect donations from people who could pay for their treatment, since most patients could not. And truthfully, neither could I. Yet I took one of the coins in my pocket and dropped it into the waiting mouth, wincing as it hit bottom with a hollow, metallic thud. Guess there hadn’t been a lot of donations lately.
It wasn’t payment for me, anyway: it was a token of appreciation for granting Laura Lesperitt her last moment of dignity. I was sure the moon goddess understood.
I went back through town and out the other end on the Tallega road where I’d met Laura. The horse had a bumpy, really uncomfortable gait that made my still-tender ribs ache with every step. I would be sure to demand a refund from Hank when I returned the beast.
It was a bright, clear day, and there was plenty of other traffic. I passed Angelina’s tavern and nodded to her as she escorted a stumbling patron out into the sunlight. She waved as the man fell first to his knees, then onto his face in the dirt. People stepped over and around him without a second glance.
I checked each person I passed for dragon boots. It seemed unlikely, but it was a way to pass the time and resharpen my skills after my little vacation. Most of them were farmers or tradesmen, although a few wealthy travelers passed me as well. None had the footwear I sought.
I rode under the shadow of the big gallows oak and drifted in behind a three-cart caravan taking two wagonloads of corn to Tallega and points beyond. The teenage boy driving the empty third wagon, its contents no doubt sold that morning in Neceda, kept glancing suspiciously over his shoulder at me, wondering why I didn’t just pass them. I simply smiled and nodded. No one was in a hurry, so despite the dry and fairly warm day, the dust stayed at a minimum, hovering in a thin, knee-high cloud.
Several travelers, still camped in the tall grass off the road, displayed tents and wares from every village within a ten-day ride. A ragged dog tied to a stake barked as we crept past, and my gray mare fought to flee across the prairie away from it. The little brother of the kid driving the empty wagon occasionally peeked at me from the bed. I made faces at him, which made him smile and duck shyly away. Their parents, ahead in the first wagon, were oblivious.
This wasn’t necessarily the best approach to the problem at hand. I could’ve stayed in town and found out who else Argoset interrogated, a perfectly appropriate activity for a sword jockey trying to find his way into a mystery. But I’d been attacked in the woods, and moreover, a girl who’d expected me to help her had been killed there. Argoset’s mystery might be in town, but mine started here, beneath these ancient, heavy-limbed trees.
I paused before entering the forest. I looked back and saw the river shimmering in the distance, its broad swath dark green and turgid. The Gusay wound in great coils through this part of the country, only growing straight and rapid when it neared the ocean across the border in Balatan. I counted four boats coming upstream, pulled by mules or horse teams onshore; three flatboats loaded with trade goods rode the central channel in the opposite direction.
I’d first come to Neceda on the Gusay, taking passage on a commercial boat with a dozen Wakle Dow slave girls in the care of the scariest matron I’d ever seen. There were other people on board, I suppose, but somehow all I could recall now were those young, flirty girls destined for a life of luxury and isolation. None were forced into the job; all signed contracts giving up every personal right in return for the lavish lifestyle they desired. I often wondered how it worked out for them.
I was coming here to meet Nightingale James, a con man with one of the more original scams going. Six feet tall and muscled like a work ox, James somehow managed to hang on to a high, girlish voice despite still having his full male package. He represented himself as a eunuch to wealthy old men with easily bored wives. Once ensconced in their households, he would seduce the wives, then blackmail them. He would also report to the husbands that the wives were cheating with some mysterious stranger, and offer to keep an eye on them-for an additional fee, of course.
Unfortunately, he was no man of action, and when the son of one of these wealthy old men caught him in the act with his mother, James found himself on the other end of the blackmail pike. He needed me to chase junior away, which turned out to be easy enough to do. I made a nice pile on the job, and also realized how ideal Neceda was to my business: small, isolated, yet a center of trade and commerce. People could find it ea
sily, but few people noticed anyone else in it. I always meant to thank Nightingale for bringing me here, but I never saw him after that job. The last I heard he’d settled in Mauston, teaching music to actual eunuchs. There’s irony for you.
The forest loomed ahead like a great wall of dense green, its supporting latticework of black wooden trunks and limbs occasionally visible through the leaves. A round gap marked the spot the road entered it, and beyond that it really did look like a tunnel, with shafts of sunlight poking through the leaves at irregular intervals.
I had no delusions that I’d find any physical clues left from the attack, like distinctive horseshoe tracks or boot marks. But if I could identify the spot the girl first ran out in front of me, I might be able to locate the farm where she’d stolen her jacket. From there, if I was lucky, I hoped to backtrack to the house she’d escaped from, and where the three men took us and tortured her to death. And if I was very lucky, those men would still be there, and it would be time for answers and a little payback.
But I wasn’t after revenge. I knew its ultimate futility: I’d seen the results of revenge on a scale most people could barely imagine, and I had no desire to walk that path. I wanted justice. I needed to know that the men who had casually tortured Laura Lesperitt would never be able to hurt anyone again. I understood these human monsters-I’d been perilously close to it myself as a younger man-and knew that they’d only stop hurting people when they also stopped breathing. So I intended to cut off their air. And if I also cut off a few limbs as well, I could live with that.
I moved to the edge of the road and traveled much slower than everyone else as I looked for clues. The air beneath the forest canopy was noticeably cooler. I saw many small trails that emerged from the woods and joined the road. None of them looked well or recently traveled, though. They were game tracks, or simply the onetime passage of someone looking for firewood, meat or toilet privacy.
A youngster of about ten cut loose from the traffic and fell in beside me. A tied bundle of fresh herbs and leaves bounced on the rump of his… her?… saggy, tired horse. “You look like you lost something, mister. Need a hand?”
I really couldn’t tell if this was a boy or girl. I nodded at the plants and asked, “You pick those or buy them in town?”
“Oh, I picked them. That’s my job. Mama does the selling.”
“Then I reckon you know these woods pretty well, don’t you?”
“I know them on that side of the road like I do my own fingernails. Daddy won’t let me cross the road into the Black River Hills, though. Says all the herbs and plants we need grow just fine on this side. Too many weird things happen over there.”
Naturally, the side she/he couldn’t visit was the side Laura had emerged from. “Weird how?”
She/he shook his/her head. Little wooden bug-shooing beads braided into his/her hair slapped her/his shoulders. “He won’t say. Just that lots of people go in there and don’t come out. And there’s people who live in there who’re…” His/her shoulders shivered. “Weird.”
I nodded. “That’s the word of the day. Tell me, did you ever see anybody with dragons on their boots poking around out here?”
“Dragons?”
“Yeah. Silver design on the back of the heel, maybe.”
Again the beads slapped his/her shoulders. “Sorry. Guess I’m not much help after all. Want to buy some foxglove? Can’t get any fresher unless you pick it yourself.”
“No thanks, er… you.”
She/he grinned mischievously. “You can’t tell if I’m a boy or a girl, can you?”
“No,” I said.
He/she laughed, nudged the horse and rejoined the traffic on the road. I shook my head and turned my attention back to the side of the road where the weird things were.
Suddenly I yanked the reins tight. The horse snorted and tossed her head in protest. I knew this was the spot. I saw no tangible trace, but the sun shone through the trees at the same angle as the moonlight that night and made identical shadow patterns. And there, behind the trunk of a huge oak tree that hid it from the road, was a trail wide enough for a rider. A mostly naked girl on foot could’ve used it easily.
It didn’t mean it was the same trail, but it was a start. The way she’d been scratched up, she could’ve just bolted through the untracked forest. But it was all I had.
I took the path down the incline. It followed a natural route through the trees, but maintained essentially a southern direction. According to my knowledge of the Muscodian countryside, this would lead me into the Black River Hills, so called because of the narrow, unusually deep waterway that bisected them before joining up with the Gusay. In addition to spooky stories and tales of weirdness, these hills were perforated with caves, old mines and sundry other hiding places where someone could torture a girl in peace. But we’d been taken someplace with a wooden floor, so I sought an actual dwelling, not a hole in the rock.
I reached a fork in the trail. I paused and studied it. I had nothing at all on which to base a decision, so I pulled a coin from my pocket, flipped it and chose the path to the left. As I nudged the horse forward I glanced up and saw, to the right, a thin trail of smoke rising into the sky. Where there was a chimney there was a house. I considered tossing the duplicitous coin off into the undergrowth, but money, even deceitful money, was too scarce right now. I pocketed it and turned down the right-hand path.
I emerged at the top of a steep but not very tall rise that looked over a tiny clearing. Below stood a small, ramshackle house. Goats milled about in a pen, and a huge pile of firewood lay stacked beside a two-wheeled cart. A scrawny garden provided meager produce. A pair of small children ran around yelling in the front yard, and their high-pitched shrieks made my horse snort in annoyance.
I looked again at the big pile of wood, and the cart beside it. Laura had called the people who provided her stolen jacket “farmers.” But it had been dark, she was in a hurry and it would be hard to farm in the middle of the forest. Might they have been woodcutters?
I headed down the slope. The two children, both under age five, froze when they saw me. Their clothes were a handmade mix of milled cloth and animal skin, and their hair was cut short. As with the herb collector, I couldn’t say for sure whether they were boys, girls or one of each. Kids these days.
“Hi,” I said. “Is your mom or dad around?”
“You don’t know my daddy,” the smaller one said.
“You’re right,” I agreed. “But I’d still like to talk to him.”
“Are you from the government?” the other asked, in a higher voice that implied femininity. She had a hard time with the last word, and pronounced each syllable distinctly, as if well practiced.
“Me? Nah.” I dismounted and crouched so we could talk at her eye level. “I live over in Neceda.”
“Daddy says King Ar-chee-bald will try to take everything away from us,” the little girl said.
I looked around at the shack they called home, the goats they used for dinner and milk and the wood they sold to get everything else. “I really wouldn’t worry about it,” I said.
“Well, I would,” a woman’s voice replied. It was deep and firm. “Now step away from my children.”
A stout, broad-shouldered woman in a threadbare dress stood in the doorway holding a spear ready over one shoulder. It was the short kind used to hunt wild boar, and her bare feet were spread in a practiced throwing stance. I said, “Hi. I think we’ve got a misunderstanding in progress here.”
“I’ll skewer you if you breathe wrong. Misunderstand that?”
I raised my hands. “No, ma’am. I’d just like to ask you if you’d seen a friend of mine, though.”
Her eyes narrowed in her weathered face. A strand of limp hair hung between her eyes. “What friend?”
“A girl named Laura. Would’ve been about ten days ago.”
“I don’t know any girl named Laura.”
“Do you know anyone who wears boots with dragons on them?”
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Her brow creased with thought, and with her free hand she tugged at her uneven neckline as if it had suddenly grown tight. Then she motioned me forward. I was very cautious and stopped well out of arm’s reach. The spear stayed aimed at the center of my chest, but she held it wrong for such a close jab and I was pretty sure I could dodge it if I had to. Then again, I might end up on a spit over their dinner fire. “You know about the dragon people?” she asked.
I nodded. “Ran into three of them out on the road a while back.”
She looked me over carefully. “You’re not one, are you?”
“No, ma’am, not me.”
“Good. You wouldn’t walk out of this yard alive if you were.” She looked past me at the kids. “Go play!” she snapped, and they scurried off into the woods like upright squirrels. She returned her attention to me. “You swear you’re not one of them?”
“Do I look like one of them?”
“They’re sneaky. How do you feel about King Archibald?”
I raised my chin and put on my most sincere face. “I’ll leave Muscodia before I’ll submit to his tyranny,” I said, adding equal parts outrage, courage and the fear that comes from espousing a lost cause. And technically my words were true. Of course, since I wasn’t a citizen I felt no patriotic loyalty, and from what I’d heard King Archibald was far too disconnected and flighty to ever do well as a tyrant.
She didn’t answer for a long, tense moment. I crossed my arms, which put my sword hand close enough to the hilt that I could draw it quickly if needed. Women, I knew, could be just as vicious as men, and if she attacked me I had no compunction about defending myself.
Finally she said, “My husband will be home soon. He’s the one you should talk to. Come on inside and wait for him, why don’t you?”
I nodded at the spear. “You going to keep pointing that at me?”
She lowered the weapon until its butt end touched the ground. “No. But this isn’t the only sharp thing I’ve got handy, just so you know.”
I bit back every single snide comment and simply said, “Yes, ma’am.” Then I followed her inside.
