She still hadn’t managed to figure out what direction they should take, but she could hear hunters calling to one another, stalking closer, and knew they shouldn’t remain in the courtyard any longer.
“How about this way?” she said, pointing to an alley at random.
“It looks as good as any,” he replied. “Let’s move.”
In fact, when they crept to the other end of the crooked passage and peeked around the corner, she decided their selection might be quite good indeed, for it had brought them back almost to the point at which they’d entered the Scab. The graffiti-blemished arch was about sixty feet to their right, and no one appeared to be guarding it.
“It looks too good to be true,” Thamalon whispered.
“I know what you mean,” she replied, “but in my experience, people don’t always hunt you in the most effective way possible. Perhaps the Quippers really didn’t leave any sentries here.”
“Or perhaps not enough of them,” he said, “and so far, this is as close as we’ve come to escaping this maze. Let’s try to make a run for it.”
They charged out into the narrow street and dashed toward the gate. Four bravos scrambled from their places of concealment to cut them off.
To the Pit with it, Shamur thought. She’d overcome worse odds in her day. Grinning fiercely, she drew her sword and ran on. Beside her, Thamalon did the same.
Something hummed, and she heard the distinctive smack of a sling bullet slamming into flesh and bone. Thamalon made a choking sound and fell.
She lurched to a halt, spun around, and saw the half dozen toughs rushing up the street behind her. Another sling bullet whizzed past her as she crouched beside her husband.
The back of his head was bloody, and he was clearly dazed. “Get up!” she said, tugging on his arm.
“Can’t,” he croaked. “You run. Maybe you can still get away.”
Perhaps she could, particularly, it suddenly occurred to her, if she took to the rooftops. Certainly it would be prudent to make the attempt. But she couldn’t find it in her heart to leave him lying helpless in the street when, for all she knew, the bullies meant to slay him out of hand.
“We’re both going to get away,” she said. “I’m going to kill every one of these bastards, and then we’ll stroll on out of here.”
She leaped to her feet, screamed, and charged the larger of the two groups of toughs. They clearly hadn’t expected that, and for an instant, they froze. One of the slingers was still trying to fumble his short sword out of its scabbard when she cut him down.
Pivoting, she dropped a second ruffian with a thrust to the throat, and took a third out of action with a slash to the sword arm. The remaining ones fell back.
She could hear the four who’d been lurking near the gate pounding up behind her. She had only seconds to kill the men in front of her so she could whirl and fight the others. She advanced, the broadsword low, inviting attack in the high line. A scar-faced man in a red doublet took the bait and slashed at her face. She parried and drove her point into his chest.
At that same instant, another ruffian attacked. Since she was still yanking her weapon from his comrade’s body, she had to slap his dagger out of line with her unweaponed hand. Then the broadsword pulled free, but the bravo had lunged in too close for her to readily use the blade. She smashed the pommel against his temple, and he dropped.
One left! She pivoted to engage him, and then her time ran out.
Pain blazed in the center of her back. Certain that someone had stabbed her, she snarled and tried to pivot around to maim him in turn, but lost her balance and fell. The surviving toughs surrounded her, striking and kicking, until she no longer had any strength to resist.
CHAPTER 16
Wyla found Magnus and Chade loafing in their usual hidey-hole in the loft, at the far end of the warehouse from her own cluttered little office. She often wondered that they didn’t find a new haven in which to hunker down and shirk, someplace she hadn’t yet discovered, but perhaps they were too lazy even to bother with that.
“Come on, sluggards,” the thickset woman with the graying ponytail said. “There’s work to be done.”
“I guess,” said Magnus, a stooped, middle-aged man with jug-handle ears. To her surprise, he didn’t sound sheepish or put-upon, but instead, somber and worried as if he and his fellow laborer had been having an uncharacteristically serious conversation.
“Is something the matter?” she asked.
“You must have heard about the trouble,” said Chade. A swarthy, rather handsome young man with a mellifluous baritone voice, he was as usual rather too well dressed for his job of lugging bales and boxes about. “The Uskevren heir and cadets were attacked yesterday. Captain Orvist and Master Selwick died in the fighting. What’s more, it’s rumored that Lord Uskevren himself hasn’t been seen for a couple of days.”
“Certainly I’ve heard about it,” Wyla said. “What I don’t understand is what it has to do with you two gentlemen of leisure stacking crates onto wagons.”
“I know how things used to be,” Magnus said. “Back when Lord Uskevren first came back to town. Enemy Houses attacked his caravans, shops, manufactories, and warehouses to try and ruin his family a second time.”
“Those days are over,” Wyla said. “Besides, if any rogues showed up here to make trouble, don’t you think the three of us could show them off?”
She fingered the well-worn hilt of the long sword hanging at her side. She’d owned the blade since her youth, when she’d served the House of Uskevren as a warrior. Eventually a lamed leg had ended her martial career, whereupon Lord Thamalon, who’d realized her talents from the beginning, had made her one of his factors. She had little use for the weapon these days, and sometimes its weight made her bad leg ache, but she would have felt undressed without it.
“We’d damn well try to drive them off,” said Chade, “and failing that, I suppose we could run away. But I’m not worried about us so much as Lord Uskevren himself. Do you think he’s all right?”
“Absolutely,” Wyla said, “and since I rode with him through the hardest and most dangerous of times, and saw firsthand what a cunning and doughty warrior he is, I’m in a position to know.”
“I hope so,” said Chade. “He’s a good man to work for, not like some. Remember how he invited us all to Stormweather Towers for that feast, and helped when Fossandor’s mother was going to lose her cottage?”
“I do,” said Wyla, “and I tell you again, whatever it is that’s happening, he and his family will be fine. Unless all his workers shirk their tasks, and his trading empire collapses.”
Magnus rolled his eyes. “All right, we get the point.”
He and Chade clambered to their feet, stepped from behind the rampart of crates upon which they relied to conceal themselves from her view, and started down the ladder to the warehouse floor. Wyla followed. As with wearing her sword, negotiating the ladder was hard on her leg. With her muscular arms, it was actually easier to hoist herself up and down on the lift. She refused to resort to such a shift, however, lest it make her feel like a cripple in truth.
Magnus and Chade sauntered outside to wheel a wagon into position for loading, slamming the door behind them. Wyla limped back toward her office, through a shadowy, cavernous space packed with wood carvings, rolled carpets, kegs of nails, stoneware, cheap pine coffins, unassembled looms, and countless other items the House of Uskevren bought, manufactured, and sold.
A mild tenor voice said, “I’m sorry, but you’re wrong.”
Wyla spun around. A stranger dressed in a crescent-shaped Man in the Moon mask and a dark blue mantle stepped from behind a shelf laden with scythes, sickles, hoes, and plows. A creature of oozing darkness, its precise shape difficult to make out in the dimness, flowed out in his wake.
“You’re the wizard who led the attacks on Lord Thamalon’s children,” Wyla breathed.
“I am indeed,” the masked man said, “and as I was observing, as a result of
my efforts, I’m afraid the House of Uskevren is actually rather far from being ‘all right.’ I killed Thamalon and Shamur already, and with your help, I’m about to dispose of their children as well.”
Wyla didn’t understand what the spellcaster meant, nor did she especially care. She was too busy trying to figure out how she might possibly survive this encounter, for plainly, whatever else was afoot, the masked man must surely mean her harm.
It would be useless to scream. With its rows of shelving and stacks of goods piled everywhere, the warehouse swallowed sound. And, given her lameness, it would be equally futile to turn and run. The wizard would undoubtedly have sufficient time to cast a spell on her before she scrambled out of sight, and for all she knew, his shadowy companion might pounce on her from behind.
She had only one option, then. Try to get in close, hurt the masked man, and keep on hurting him until he was dead. Her old master-at-arms had taught her that was how you kept a hostile wizard from working any magic.
She’d have a better chance if she could somehow catch him by surprise. To that end, she said, “Just tell me what you want from me, and I’ll do it. I don’t want to die.”
“Would that I could trust you,” the wizard replied. “But I remember how devoted you were to Thamalon in the old days, I rather doubt you’ve—”
She whipped out her sword and charged him.
Reacting instantly, the wizard skipped nimbly backward, snatched a small length of iron from one of his pockets, brandished it, and rattled off a rhyme.
Purple fire flared from the end of his polished staff, bathing her in stinging though tepid flame. Her muscles clenched painfully, depriving her of the ability to move. Off balance, she fell facedown on the floor.
Struggling to jump back up, all Wyla’s rigid body could do was shudder. He took hold of her, and, grunting, rolled her over onto her back. Gazing helplessly up at him, she noticed the strange pale eyes peering from their holes in his blandly smiling mask.
“That ploy might almost have worked,” he said, “except that two nights ago, Shamur Uskevren made a move and caught me flatfooted when I was in mid-sentence. I’ve been more careful since. Good-bye, Wyla.” He took hold of a portion of his mantle, folded it to make a double thickness, then pressed it down on her face.
Bileworm watched avidly as Master smothered the woman. By his standards, it wasn’t an especially long or excruciating death, but he could certainly imagine Wyla’s terror and frustration as, deprived of all capacity to resist, she suffocated, and that gave him something to savor.
After a minute, Master took the folds of cloth away and held his hand above her mouth, making sure her breathing had ceased.
“Well, thank goodness that’s done,” he said. “I thought those two loafers in the loft were never going to leave.”
“Shall I?” Bileworm asked.
“Of course.”
The spirit spiraled upward, stretching his substance thin, then swooped down and slid through the tiny space between Wyla’s upper and lower teeth. Once he was completely inside her, and had aligned his own ethereal limbs with the coarse matter of the corpse’s, sensation came. The floor, hard and cold against his back. His hand clenched painfully tight on the sword hilt. A slight rawness on his face, where the weave of Master’s mantle had chafed Wyla’s skin.
He reached inside himself for the lame warrior’s memories. For an instant, he glimpsed a chaotic jumble of images and sensations, loves and hates, joys, sorrows, and regrets. Then it burst like a bubble and left nothingness behind.
He frowned, prompting Master to ask, “What’s the matter?”
“We have a problem,” Bileworm said, climbing to his feet, surprised by the sharpness of the twinge in the calf of the bad leg. “I own the body, but her mind is gone.”
“Don’t worry. It shouldn’t matter.”
Bileworm hesitated. “Are you sure?”
“Of course. No one will doubt you’re the person you appear to be. Why should they? Nor will our dupes, worried as they surely are, bother you with personal questions to which you have no answers. Their only concern will be the tidings you bring.”
CHAPTER 17
Shamur watched with admiration as Thamalon, seemingly recovered from the ill effects of his head wound, approached the dais and throne at the far end of the cavernous chamber. With his chin held high and his easy smile, he looked more like an honored envoy at the court of some friendly monarch than a prisoner in a den of robbers and murderers.
Meanwhile, the chieftain of the Quippers, a blond, square-jawed hulk as huge as Talbot or Vox, evidently liked to affect the appearance of a simple fisherman, for he sported the sandals, slop-hose, and open, sleeveless tunic that such folk often wore in clement weather. The creature on his knee, however, rather spoiled the illusion, for it was a gray, red-eyed galltrit. Such gremlins lived in filth and, like leeches, subsisted on the blood of others. No common waterman would treat such a nasty beast like a pet. Shamur suspected no one would, unless his own disposition and habits were equally foul.
Arriving at the foot of the dais, Thamalon inclined his head, respectfully but by no means servilely. “Good morning, or is it afternoon by now? Either way, you must be Avos the Fisher. My name is Balan, and my companion is Evaine. We work for the House of Karn.”
It was a bold lie, but not, Shamur thought, an idiotic one. Though Thamalon had opposed the Quippers off and on for a number of years, it had always been through the medium of the Scepters and other agents, never face to face. It was quite possible that none of the rogues assembled in this room had ever seen him up close, or her either. Or at least, not unless the knave in question was one of the those who had accompanied Master Moon into the woods.
Even if some of them had, the Uskevren still might go unrecognized. They’d changed their appearances since the previous encounter, and, by venturing unescorted into the Scab, had behaved in a manner that no one would expect of an aristocrat. Moreover, all the scoundrels gathered here presumably “knew” that Shamur and Thamalon were dead, and that false certainty might serve to disguise them best of all.
She held her breath as she waited to see if he was going to get away with the deception.
By the time the ruffians in the street had finished subduing and disarming her, she’d realized she hadn’t been stabbed or cut in the back after all, just clubbed very painfully, and thereafter, all the toughs had contented themselves with battering her with the flats of their blades, their boots, or other blunt implements. Evidently they wanted to take her and Thamalon alive for questioning.
The bravos tended in the most cursory fashion to their wounded comrades, rifled the pockets of the slain ones, then roughly hauled the nobles to their feet and marched them away, one scoundrel running on ahead to carry the news of their apprehension. At first the Quippers virtually had to carry Thamalon, but to Shamur’s relief, he revived by the time they reached their destination.
On the outside, that terminus was yet another grimy, crumbling brownstone tenement. Inside, she saw that the Quippers had transformed the bottom two floors of the building into what might almost be deemed a parody of a spacious, lordly hall, tearing out the ceiling and most of the interior walls to create a single open space. The renovation had left scars and grit behind. Rats scuttled in the shadows. Trash and litter rotted wherever anyone had cared to drop it.
Yet atop the rubble and decay lay a veneer of luxury, like sweet frosting on a toadstool. Costly furniture, disintegrating rapidly from the hard and careless use it was receiving, stood haphazardly about the floor, along with kegs of ale and racks of wine. Paintings and tapestries hung crookedly on the walls. Some had been used for target practice, and the hilts of throwing knives jutted from their surfaces. Others had been scrawled upon in the expression of a coarse and ribald wit. Shamur surmised that all these once-fine articles constituted booty stolen from the docks. A miscellany of nautical implements, including oars, harpoons, nets, and a collection of painted figureheads, added
yet another note of bizarreness to the décor.
The hall was likewise full of surly-looking toughs and their hard-eyed doxies, many of whom had peered curiously as the Uskevren’s captors shoved them toward Avos the Fisher’s seat.
Now the huge rogue sneered down at Thamalon. “What did you think you were playing at,” he rumbled, in a voice as deep as Shamur had ever heard issue from a human throat, “poking around in my domain?”
Shamur felt a frisson of excitement. Avos hadn’t challenged Thamalon’s assertion that the two of them were mere agents of the House of Karn. Evidently he believed it. The nobles were still in deadly peril, of course, but perhaps not quite as much as if the Quippers had known who they really were. It was just conceivable that they might be able to talk their way out of this predicament.
Thamalon smiled up at Avos. “In retrospect, it doesn’t seem like such a good idea. But our master commanded us to come to the Scab and ferret out information. We hoped we could obtain it and depart without attracting unwanted attention. Plainly, we were overly optimistic.”
Avos snorted. “Aye, cully, you were. There was a time when you might have slipped in and out unnoticed, but not anymore. These days, I rule the Scab, and I know it every time a roach crawls or a louse bites. Now, what were you trying to find out?”
Thamalon shrugged. “If your spies”—at this the galltrit preened and leered, baring its pointed fangs, and Avos scratched it behind the ear—“overheard us, you presumably know already. We’re inquiring into the murders of Shamur Uskevren, who was born a Karn, and her husband.”
Some of the watchers muttered to one another. Avos shot them a glare, and they subsided. “Why, I didn’t even know they had been murdered,” the big man said, in a tone of mock innocence that made it plain he didn’t care whether Thamalon believed him or not. “What makes you think the Quippers had anything to do with it?”
“Lord Karn is certain you did,” Thamalon replied. “As I understand it, one member of your band, a fellow with fish-scale tattoos and a gold ring in his lip, related the tale to the wrong streetwalker, who subsequently sold it to my employer.”
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