Not Quite Scaramouche

by Joel Rosenberg

  Well, at least Erenor hadn't demonstrated how useless the pistol would be by pointing it at Pirojil's head. Too bad he hadn't used his own head as a target to show how safe it was.

  Pirojil used a relatively clean spot on the front of his own tunic to wipe the mud off his sword, then sheathed the sword – in its sheath, not in Erenor's guts, tempting though the idea was. "We've wasted more than enough time," he said, as the rain again intensified. "Let's get moving."

  He set out at a slow walk, each step with his right leg a stab to his right hip. But it was just pain. In the long run, pain could sap your energy probably almost as quickly as a hard, cold rain. The thing to do was to keep yourself warm, and the metal flask of corn whiskey in his rucksack would have done just that.

  But that would have meant stopping to rest for a moment, and although he feared only distantly that he could not start up again once he had stopped, he would have cut off any finger except his trigger finger before showing such weakness in front of Erenor.

  Erenor, a part of Pirojil's mind noted with savage glee, was starting to fall behind. Maybe he was younger, and surely he was less damaged, but there was still an advantage to being resolute and determined. It was a matter of strength of character, and even an ordinary soldier – a good ordinary soldier, at least – had to have more character, more will, more determination than some illusionist and swindler. It certainly took intelligence and cunning to separate people from their coin, having them exchange entirely real copper and silver for amulets, scrolls, and potions of at best dubious puissance, but it did not take iron will, a resolution to ignore that which could be ignored and proceed anyway over the screaming of bruised flesh and battered bones when it could not be ignored.

  He heard Erenor mumbling something behind him, but he couldn't make out the words without dropping back, and there was nothing that Erenor could say that would have made him want to drop back. Let the bastard fall behind, let him collapse on the wet road, let him seek shelter under a tall tree and have it shattered by lightning, let him ...

  It was strange. Maybe Pirojil was better off than he thought he was, or perhaps he was so far gone in pain and effort that it just didn't hurt anymore. No, that was an overstatement, but it was true that the pain in his hip and back and the pounding headache were receding, moment by moment, settling down to a state that was not by any means comfortable, but was merely uncomfortable, not agonizing.

  Whatever it was had apparently affected Erenor, as well; he caught up with Pirojil, and kept pace with him.

  The rain eased even further, but the lightning – now so far away that it was often several steps between the flash and the crash of thunder – was coming faster and faster, lighting up the road every few moments.

  And ahead – praise be to whatever power was listening! – around the next curve, a crossroads waited, one sign that Pirojil could make out in the lightning flashes holding the glyph for spring, a stylized fountain spewing forth water, and while he was sure that the other held a glyph of a ford, he didn't need to see it to know that that was the way that he and Erenor were to go. The village would not be far down the road, and having somehow or other found a reserve of strength and will in his body and mind, it would only be a matter of time until –

  There was the quietest of splashes behind him, and he was never sure if it was instinct, judgment, or accident that caused him to duck to one side just as the big man with the sword lunged by, the tip barely grazing his side in passing.

  The cool wetness of the metal told him that it had pierced his side, just below the ribcage, but there was, strangely, only the slightest of pain. Of course, he thought, as he slammed his body into the other, tackling him to the ground, that was probably only a momentary respite, particularly if there were other attackers.

  Rough fingers clawed at face and throat, and a knee smashed into his outer thigh. Pirojil fought back, breaking the hold of the fingers on his throat with a quick grab that snapped finger bones in the attacker's hand.

  He missed Durine and Kethol like he would have missed an arm and a leg. If he didn't finish this one off quickly, rolling on the ground, in the dirt and water and mud like this, he could be speared through the back or side like a fish on a plate.

  It never occurred to him that his opponent could take him. Clumsy fool – if he was any good, Pirojil would already be dead, and –

  Light flared, bright and yellow, dazzling his eyes momentarily.

  But only momentarily – his vision cleared almost immediately, and he rolled away from where his attacker knelt on the road, hands clawing at his own face, while another man, mostly concealed in a thick cloak, staggered blindly toward where Erenor stood, proud and upright, his arms raised, fingers spread widely.

  They were all surrounded by a bright, golden glow that seemed to radiate from the stones of the road itself, a glow so bright that it washed out all colors, and should have blinded Pirojil as much as it did the others.

  But it didn't. And when Pirojil drew his own sword and hacked down at the swordsman's arm, the other let out a grunt as the blade fell from his fingers, and he turned toward Pirojil, away from Erenor.

  Pirojil stopped him with a low lunge that changed target and took him neatly in the throat, followed by a kick to the side of the knee as his attacker staggered past, emitting wet, horrid burbling sounds.

  It was then that the exhaustion and pain hit him, all at once.

  He had long had the belief – in retrospect, the conceit – that he could soldier on through any pain, that physical discomfort, even agony, could not stop him from doing whatever it was that he needed to do, and on more than one occasion, he had been able to force himself to function, no matter the pain ...

  But red agony washed up his injured side, leaving his right arm useless, his sword falling from fingers that no longer would obey him.

  And there was one man left. He staggered toward Pirojil, his mouth wide in a soundless scream, his dazzled eyes blind and unblinking. This one was a big man, easily a head taller than Pirojil, the saber in his right hand and short, stabbing sword in his left hand trying to weave some sort of pattern in the air, for defense or attack.

  Pirojil pulled his remaining pistol from his belt with his left hand, thumb-cocked it, leveled it carefully at the big man's chest, then pulled the trigger.

  Click.

  It would have been too much to hope, too much to ask, for the other flintlock pistol to have kept its pan dry through the storm and the fighting and the rolling around on the ground. The only way Pirojil could have made sure it would work would have been to point it at his own crotch.

  He hobbled to one side, but an involuntary grunt of pain escaped his gritted teeth, and his attacker turned, lunging wildly toward him.

  It should have been an easy thing for Pirojil to take on a blinded man, but it was all he could do to shuffle to one side, out of the way.

  And then Erenor, his belt knife held clumsily in his hand, was on the big man's back, his arm rising and falling, over and over again.

  Pirojil wouldn't have thought that such a big man would have such a high-pitched scream.

  He crouched over the body in the pre-dawn light, barely able to keep his eyes open. He must have bled more than he had thought, more than the shallow slash along his side should have.

  There was nothing about either of the dead men that gave any indication as to who they were, or where they were from. Not that he would have believed that, say, tunics in the red and gray of Barony Adahan would have meant that Bren Adahan had sent these killers.

  Well, not killers. Would-be killers. Pirojil was more than a little worse for wear, but he and Erenor were still breathing.

  He took his belt knife and sliced through the tunic, leaving the strangely motionless, hairy chest bare to the cold morning air. The dead man wouldn't mind.

  No, there was nothing useful hidden under his clothes.

  "There's gold in his pouch," Erenor said, jingling coins in his hand.


  "I'm surprised," Pirojil said, forcing the words to come out calmly and evenly, not as grunts of pain. "I would have thought that you would have found only a couple of coppers, and made any gold vanish into your pouch."

  Erenor's lips thinned momentarily. "Yes," he said, "after all the many times I've stolen from you, taken the very food from your lips, the coin from your purse, the stiffness from your organ, and the sense from your speech, surely, surely you should suspect me now."

  He smiled as he spoke, his usual easy – too easy – smile firmly in place, as though he was speaking for somebody's amusement, if only his own.

  His long fingers delicately probed at Pirojil's side, pulling away torn cloth so that he could get at the wound. "I'm not a healer – I've no channel to Hand, Great Spider, nor Eareven Powers – and my own skills are of illusion, not reality, but I don't really think you want to keep bleeding to death. Of course, I could be wrong, and I could be right and you could choose to contradict me, as usual, just for the sake of making me out to be wrong, but maybe we should just pour in a vial of healing draughts, perhaps, possibly, don't you think?"

  Those were for emergencies, not for comfort. They weren't just expensive – but hard to get. "Sew it up."

  "I'm sure I did not hear you correctly. I'm no apothecary – I'm just a wizard, technically an apprentice wizard, at that, with some skills of illusion." He smiled, smugly. "And not entirely useless skills, either, as these two would be happy to say if somebody were to reanimate them long enough."

  "There's a sewing kit in my rucksack," Pirojil said. "Just sew the edges of the wound together, and then let's get going." It would take some time for infection to set in – the spirits of gangrene and wound rot were lazy. There should be a healer in the village, or one nearby, and that would be enough for that.

  "And as to the pain?"

  "Just do it." Pain was a private matter, as long as you could keep it to yourself. Pirojil could clench his jaws as tightly as anybody. And never mind that he was chilled to the bone, that it was all he could do to keep his teeth from chattering like a coward's, that every breath came with its own stab of fiery agony, that cut through his side over and over again.

  "As you will." Erenor slipped his forearm under Pirojil's left armpit and levered him to his feet. "I'd like to sit you down on a firm bench in front of a roaring fire, but, given the present situation," he said, as he guided Pirojil to the side of the road, "I'm afraid this cold rock is going to have to do."

  Pirojil seated, Erenor retrieved his rucksack and rummaged through it with annoying familiarity. "Oh, here it is." Erenor shook his head as he produced the leather pouch and loosened the drawstrings. "You do always have to make things difficult for yourself, don't you?"

  He crouched next to Pirojil, and brought up his hand, fingers cupped, as though gripping an invisible ball right next to Pirojil's side.

  His voice low, barely audible, Erenor murmured strange words that Pirojil tried to remember, but couldn't. He listened as carefully as he could, and could make out each syllable distinctly, but as Erenor completed each word, it vanished from Pirojil's mind, as though it had never been there, like a snowflake disappearing as it struck a hot skillet.

  He didn't know what Erenor was up to, but the time to argue with a wizard, as anybody but a fool knew, was before or after the wizard was casting a spell, not during. There were powers and forces involved that Pirojil was not capable of understanding, but it wasn't necessary to understand magic – it wasn't necessary even to be able to see more than a blur on the page on which spell runes were written – in order to fear it. Or, at the very least, to have a healthy caution.

  For a moment, the pain in his wound became a cold tingling, as though instead of cutting him open, somebody had simply applied the cold flat of a blade to his side, and then there was no sensation at all.

  None.

  Erenor looked up and smiled. "Actually," he said, "it still hurts you every bit as much as it did before, but I've put a minor seeming on it, to fool you." He took up the needle, and threaded it with a small length of sinew, then quickly began to sew up Pirojil's wound, the thumb and forefinger of his left hand pressing the ragged lips of the cut together.

  It was a strange sensation: it was as though Pirojil was watching somebody else's wound be treated.

  Wait. And it had been like somebody else having been tired before, when Pirojil had found himself not nearly as tired as he thought he should be.

  "Is that how we got through the rain?"

  "Well... since you asked, I don't think you have any real question about the answer."

  Pirojil's lips tightened. "You mean, you fooled me into believing that I wasn't as dog-tired as I was."

  Erenor had finished sewing up the wound, and he tied a clumsy knot in the end of the sinew, then trimmed off the remainder with his belt knife. The spare sinew and the bloody needle went back into the pouch.

  "Fooled is such an ... unfriendly word," he said. "Let's just say that I used my talents to help you along, for which I can, no doubt, expect the usual gratitude, expressed with a curse and a cuff of the hand, that has so endeared the both of you to me." His brow furrowed for a moment, and then he reached into Pirojil's rucksack and produced a metal flask, which he opened. "You know, the usual objection to killing wound spirits with whiskey doesn't apply right now, and even if it did, well, I guess that would be your problem, now, wouldn't it, Master Pirojil?"

  He brought the flask to his lips and took a small swallow, and then a larger mouthful, which, without any warning, he spat into the wound.

  Pirojil clenched his jaws tightly together to keep from screaming. Raw whiskey on a wound should have, at the least, hurt terribly.

  He felt silly. It didn't hurt. It didn't even feel cold. Just wet.

  "Drink. You look like you could use it."

  Pirojil accepted the flask and tilted it back, letting the fiery whiskey burn his throat, warming him to the core. Walter Slovotsky had once said something about how a drink actually chilled you rather than warmed you, but that just went to show that Walter Slovotsky didn't know nearly as much as he thought he did.

  Pirojil forced himself to his feet. It was harder to stand than it should have been, but he managed to remain standing, and took first one step, and then another.

  "We still need to get to the village," he said.

  Erenor shouldered both rucksacks. "Why don't you take the swords – you're probably of more use with them, even in your present condition, than I am." He turned and began to walk away down the road. "Not," he said, not bothering to sound anything but smug and self-satisfied, "that I am as entirely useless, as some people have all too often suggested that I am." He started to whistle some silly tune, but stopped when Pirojil told him to shut up.

  They weren't more than a couple of hundred paces down the road when the flapping of leathery wings filled the air.

  Chapter 12

  Night Moves II:

  Kethol, Ahira, and Another

  It never bothered him that other people were good at other things – that was, after all, the way of the world – but Kethol had always hated it when somebody was better at something he, himself, thought he was particularly good at. At bones – rare as it was to find a bones player who was better than he was, although it was, thankfully, common to find more than one who thought he was better than a none too sober looking soldier – it would mean losing money; with a bow, it would mean losing a bet, or, under the wrong circumstances, it could mean losing his life; with a sword, it would mean that he would have had to rely on Pirojil and Durine, rather than have them rely on him.

  He hated that. Kethol liked being somebody that others could rely on. He knew he wasn't the most quick-witted of men, but he liked to think he was reliable, and good at, well, what he was good at.

  And moving through a forest quietly was something that he was good at, day or night.

  At night, though, Ahira was better at it than Kethol was, and he should have resented
that.

  But there was something about Ahira that simply didn't let that bother him, didn't make him resent the dwarf taking the lead through the forest. It was, maybe, as simple as the fact that the dwarf wasn't human, and that Kethol could not compete with Ahira in a test of night vision any more than Ahira could compete with him in a longbow competition. He almost smiled at the idea of the dwarf trying to manipulate a bow whose length was half again his height. Yes, the dwarf was actually quite a good shot with his short horn bow, and even Durine hadn't been strong enough to string it.

  But there was something about a good longbow – be it of yew or horn or both – that made its clothyard shafts fly farther and truer in the hands of an expert bowman than could be accounted for by anything short of magic.

  Working their way down a trail at night, though, it simply made sense for Ahira to take the lead, as he could see the path better than Kethol could.

  You had to proceed mostly by feel at night; the wan, thin light of the overhead stars gave little illumination, but that little was enough.

  Or, at least, it was enough until the clouds above slipped silently over the forest, leaving only an idle quartet of dancing Faerie lights, high above the forest, to provide illumination.

  And then it started to rain. Not gently, not even at first; within moments the drumming of fat raindrops against the canopy of leaves above drowned out the forest noises, but it also frightened the Faerie lights away, leaving Kethol in the blackest of darkness, wet and miserable as the storm broke.

  He could have panicked, but that wouldn't have done any good. Yes, he was in the woods in the rain and the dark, but he had been in the woods in the rain and the dark before, and he would manage now as he had managed then. He had a working map in his head of the twists and turns of the path for a dozen paces ahead, and that was all that he and Ahira needed. There was no point in trying to push their way through a nighttime rainstorm, after all. Even Ahira's darksight wouldn't work well enough in the rain.