by Greg Keyes
“Feel that?” he said. “There’s a hole there. Knife goes in as easy as into butter. But I don’t have to do that. That wound in your arm isn’t serious, and you could crawl off to the Midenlands, find a nice woman, and churn butter for the rest of your life. But first you have to make sure I don’t die and my friend doesn’t die.”
“Fend will kill me.”
Aspar laughed. “Now that’s just silly. You don’t help me, and you’ll be mostly maggots before Fend even knows what happened to you.”
“Yah,” the man said miserably. “There is some medicine. Raff has it on him, in a blue bottle. One drink a day, as much as would go in a little spoon. But you have to leave me some.”
“Do I?”
“Because I’ll die, anyway,” the man explained. “The medicine doesn’t stop the poison; it just slows it down. Stop taking it for a few days and you’re just as dead as you would have been.”
“Really. And what kind of fool—hah. I see it now. Fend didn’t tell you that until it was too late, did he?”
“No. But he has the antidote. When we’re finished, he was going to give it to us.”
“I see.” He lifted his head with great difficulty. “Winna? It’s in a blue bottle.”
“I’ve got that,” she called back.
“Bring it here.”
He set the point of his knife against the man’s head.
A moment later Winna fell to her knees beside him. Her eyes were red, and her skin a wormy white.
“Drink some,” he told Winna. He pushed a bit with the knife. “If it kills her, you go next,” he said.
“Give me some first,” the man said. “I’ll prove it’s not poison.”
Winna lifted the blue bottle, took a swallow, and made a face. For a long moment nothing happened.
“That feels better,” Winna said. “Everything isn’t spinning anymore.”
Aspar nodded, took the bottle, and drank some himself. It was foul, like boiled centipedes and wormwood, but he felt almost instantly better. He stoppered the bottle carefully and put it in his haversack.
“What are you helping Fend with, anyhow?” Aspar asked. “What are you supposed to finish before he gives you the antidote?”
“We’re just supposed to follow him and kill anything the woorm doesn’t.”
“Yah. Why?”
“He’s after killing the slinders, is part of it,” he said. “But there’s also some fellow he’s supposed to find; I don’t know the name. Supposed to be with you, I think.”
“Fend sent the utins after him?” Aspar asked.
“Yah. They went ahead and didn’t come back.”
“Where does Fend get these monsters?”
“He got the woorm from the Sarnwood witch, or so ’e said. But the monsters, they don’t serve Fend. He and the monsters serve the same master.”
“And who would that be?”
“None of us know. There’s a priest, from Hansa, name of Ashern. I think he knows, but he’s with Fend on the woorm. The Sefry just hired us for the loot. Said we could have anything that turned up in the woorm’s trail. Then he told us we were poisoned and let Galus die to prove him werlic.
“Please, holter, I’m begging you.”
“That’s all you know?”
“That’s all.”
Aspar flipped him over on his back. He winced and shut his eyes. Aspar shook the bottle; it was more than half-full.
“Open your mouth.”
The man did so, and Aspar dribbled in a few drops.
“Tell me something new,” Aspar said, “and I’ll give you a little more. If you last long enough, the woorm’s venom might work out of your system on its own, yah? Or you could find a shinecrafter to help you. A chance for you to live to see another full moon, anyway. Better than you have now.”
“Yah. What do you want to know?”
“Why did Fend have the girls kidnapped?”
“Girls?”
“On the border with Loiyes. Where he sent the utins.”
The man shook his head. “Those men? We had nothing to do with them. The woorm and the utins found your man; they scented him somehow. Those other fellows—we killed some of them when we happened upon them. Fend told us if we saw a couple of girls to just kill them, too, but not to go out of our way. ‘It’s not our job, that,’ he said. ‘Let the others worry about that.’”
Aspar dribbled a few more drops onto the man’s tongue.
“What else?”
“I don’t know anything else. I didn’t understand what I was getting into. I’m just a thief. I’ve never even killed anyone before. I never believed these things existed, but now I’ve seen ’em, I just want to go away. I just want to live.”
“Yah,” Aspar said. “Go, then.”
“But the poison…”
“I’ve given you all I can. I’ll need the rest to find Fend, kill ’im, and take his antidote. Do you know what it looks like?”
“No.”
“I could still just kill you…”
“I really don’t know.”
Which means it might well not exist at all, Aspar thought grimly.
“Come on, Winna,” he said. “I’ve a feeling we’d better get started.”
PARALYZED BY TERROR, Anne watched the tapestry lift and darkness appear behind it.
The candles had all gone out, and though the only light was that of the moon, she could see every detail of the room clearly. The pulse in her head was so strong, she feared she would faint, and she wanted to look away from what was coming.
She had dreamed of Fastia with worms in her eyes, going behind that tapestry, opening a secret door. Now she saw that the door was really there and something was coming out of it. Here, in the waking world.
Or was she awake?
The figure that stepped into the room, however, wasn’t Fastia. At first it seemed a shadow, but then the moonlight resolved someone dressed all in black, masked and hooded. A slight figure, a woman or perhaps a child, carrying something long, dark, and pointed in one hand.
Assassin, she thought, suddenly feeling numb and very slow.
Then the person’s eyes appeared, and Anne knew she had been seen.
“Help!” she shouted quite deliberately. “Help, murder!”
Without a sound, the figure flung toward her. Anne’s paralysis ended instantly; she rolled off the bed and onto her feet, lurching toward the door.
Something cold and hard hit her in her upper arm, and she couldn’t move that limb anymore. It seemed frozen in the act of lifting; she could neither lower nor raise it. She looked and saw that something dark and thin had stabbed through the flesh below the bone. It went straight through and out the other side, where it was stuck in Lew.
Anne raised her eyes and found a violet gaze fixed on her from only a handspan away. She looked back down and understood that the thin thing in her arm was the blade of a sword, held by the man. Somehow she knew it was a man, however slight in build.
Sefry, she realized.
He yanked at the sword, which was stuck solidly in the bedpost. Seeming to think better of that, he let his other hand drop to his waist. The pain of the sword in her arm suddenly hit her, but the fear proved stronger, because she knew he had to be reaching for a knife.
She put her head in the moon, buried her feet in the dark tangled roots of the earth, grabbed his hair with her free hand, and kissed him.
His lips were warm, hot even, and as she touched them, lightning seemed to strike down her spine and the taste of serpent musk and charring juniper burned in her throat. Inside, he was wet and damp, like all men, but terribly wrong, cold where he ought to be hot, hot where he ought to be cold, and nothing familiar. He seemed broken and reformed, each curve in his bone like a healed shattering, every tissue a scar.
He screamed, and she felt a sudden hard yank at her arm as he pushed away. The sword pulled clean, and she slid to the floor, landing on her behind with her legs spraddled in front of her.
&nb
sp; The Sefry stepped back and shook his head like a dog with water in its ear.
She tried to scream again but found she had no breath. She gripped her arm, and everything was sticky-wet with blood, which she understood was her own.
The door chose that moment to burst open, however, and two of Elyoner’s guards charged in, carrying torches that seemed to burn so brightly that Anne was nearly blinded.
Her attacker, reduced to a dark stick figure by the brilliance, appeared to recover. His long sword darted out and hit one of the guards in the throat. The poor young man fell to his knees, dropping his torch and grasping at the wound, trying to hold his life in with his hands. Anne sympathized as blood squirted between her fingers.
The other fellow, bellowing for help, was a little warier. He wore half-plate armor and carried a heavy sword, which he thrust at the assassin rather than pulling back for a cut. The Sefry made a few experimental attacks, which the guard beat away.
“Run, Princess,” the guard said.
Anne noticed that there was a gap between him and the door; she could run if she could make her legs work. She tried to get to her knees but slipped in the blood, wondering how close she was to bleeding to death.
The Sefry attacked and stumbled. With a roar, the guard cut hard; Anne couldn’t follow what happened then, but steel rang on steel, and Elyoner’s man went staggering past the Sefry and slammed into the wall. He collapsed there, unmoving.
The assassin was turning back toward her when another figure exploded through the open door.
It was Cazio. He looked odd, very odd, and for a moment Anne couldn’t place why. Then she appreciated that he was as naked as the day he was born.
But he had Caspator in one hand. With only the slight hesitation it took for him to take in the situation, he flung himself at her attacker.
Cazio plunged Caspator toward the dark figure, but the blade was met with the quick, familiar parry of perto, followed by a strong bind in uhtave.
Without having to think, Cazio took the attack into a receding parry and replied with a thrust to the throat. His opponent avoided by withdrawing, and for a moment neither of them moved. Cazio had a distant moment of faint embarrassment that he was naked, yet he and Austra both had been in that state, a chamber away, when he had heard Anne’s scream. If he’d stopped to dress, she might be dead now.
Truly, she was already wounded, and fear for her wiped away the embarrassment over his lack of clothing, that and the sudden realization that finally, after all these months, he was facing another student of dessrata.
“Come on,” Cazio said, “Let’s finish this before anyone shows up to interfere.”
He could already hear more guards coming.
The man cocked his head to the side, then thrust. Cazio took a retreat, not trusting the verity of the move, and was taken aback when the fellow suddenly darted toward the wall, lifting a tapestry and vanishing into a dark opening beyond.
Cursing, Cazio leapt after him, brushing the tapestry back with his left hand. A blade snaked out of the darkness, and he just managed to deflect it. He stepped inside the point and pressed the weapon into the wall with his off hand—then ran straight into a fist. It hit him in the jaw; the blow wasn’t so much strong as it was surprising. He released the blade.
Cazio stumbled back, weaving Caspator through the parries, hoping to catch a thrust he couldn’t see. But receding footsteps told him that the fellow was running now, without renewing the attack.
Cursing, Cazio ran after him.
After a few seconds, reason reasserted itself and he slowed to a walk. After all, he couldn’t see anything. He considered going back for a torch, but he still could hear soft footfalls ahead, and he didn’t want to lose the trail. Keeping his left hand on the wall, he pressed forth quickly, Caspator held out before him like a blind man’s cane.
He almost stumbled when the passageway became stairs, descending in a narrow series of turns. Ahead he heard a click and saw a brief moment of moonlight casting a human shadow on a landing below.
Then the light was gone.
He reached the landing and, after a brief search, discovered the door and pushed it open. The passage issued from a garden wall hidden by a hedge. A short path led to an open, grassy glade suffused in moonlight. He didn’t see Anne’s assailant anywhere.
He couldn’t imagine that the man had had time to cross the open grass, so instead of walking out of the hedge, he rolled and found his deduction satisfied by the sough of steel where his head ought to have been.
He came back to his feet with a guard in prismo.
“This is disappointing,” he said. “I’ve come across land and sea and land again and never met another dessrator. I am so sick of the meat cleaving that passes for swordplay in these barbarian lands. Now I finally find someone who might give me some entertainment, and I discover that he’s a coward, unwilling to stand and fight.”
“Sorry,” the fellow replied in a muffled voice. “But you must understand that while I’ve no trouble fighting you, I can’t be bothered to engage with the whole castle. And if I allow you to delay me, that will be my position.”
That was right; they had been in Anne’s room.
Cazio had heard the guards approaching behind him, and then—
They were outside. How had that happened?
He hazily remembered chasing the fellow, but if he had followed him out of Anne’s room and down the stairs, shouldn’t they have gone past the approaching soldiers? Had they leapt out of a window?
The man cut short Cazio’s wondering by attacking. He was small and nimble, a Sefry, perhaps? Cazio had never fought a Sefry dessrator. His blade was lampblacked and difficult to see.
Cazio parried, but the attack turned out to be a feint, the real attack slipping in from a low line. Cazio took a step back to give him time to find the blade, which he did, catching it in the parry of seft, then twisting to one side to avoid the rapid renewal of the attack in the high line. The blade whispered through the air near his throat, and he straightened his arm.
His enemy deflected it with the flat of his palm, and suddenly they were at close quarters again. Cazio stepped in fast and hit the man with his shoulder, then followed with a short lunge that nicked an arm. He recovered, ready to press, when he became cognizant that the assassin once again was fleeing.
“Mamres curse you, stand and fight!” Cazio bellowed. He was getting cold now. His bare feet crunched on snow.
Once again he chased after the elusive swordsman, panting dragon breath. His fingers, nose, and other extremities were numbing with cold such as he had never known, and he began to remember stories he had heard of body parts freezing off. Could such a thing really happen? It had always seemed absurd.
They burst from the maze and sprinted through a garden where a thinly clothed statue of Lady Erenda presided over a pair of marble lovers in a frozen basin. Ahead, Cazio could see a canal and the swordsman’s destination: a horse tethered in a small grove of trees.
He tried to redouble his speed, with limited success. The snow and his numb toes made it difficult to keep his balance.
The swordsman was trying to untie his beast when Cazio launched his attack. Giving up the task, the man turned to meet him. Cazio saw with surprise that he had pulled his mask down, probably to breathe better. The face was indeed Sefry, delicate and almost blue in the moonlight, with hair so fair that it looked as if he had no eyebrows or lashes, as if he were carved of alabaster.
He avoided Cazio’s rush, turning his body aside and leaving his point for Cazio to impale himself on. Cazio checked his headlong rush, however, and picked up the extended blade in a bind. He was unable to riposte, but pushed past instead, and they both turned to face each other again.
“I’m really going to have to kill you,” the Sefry remarked.
“Your Vitellian is odd, almost more Safnian,” Cazio said. “Tell me your name, or if not that, at least where you hail from.”
“Sefry hail from no
where, as you must know,” the assassin replied. “But my clan plied the routes from Abrinia to Virgenya.”
“Yes, but you did not learn your dessrata in Abrinia or Virgenya. Then where?”
“In Toto da’Curnas,” he replied, “in the Alixanath Mountains. My mestro was named Espedio Raes da Loviada.”
“Mestro Espedio?” Z’Acatto had studied with Espedio. “Mestro Espedio has been dead for a long time,” Cazio said.
“And Sefry live a long time,” the fellow replied.
“Give me something to call you.”
“Call me Acredo,” he replied. “It is the name of my rapier.”
“Acredo, I no more believe you studied with Mestro Espedio than that you’ve hunted rabbits on the moon, but let me see. I attack with the caspo dolo didieto dachi pere—” He launched an attack to the foot.
Acredo responded by instantly countering to Cazio’s face, but that was anticipated, and Cazio changed his attack to countertime along the blade. Acredo receded into prismo, then cut over Cazio’s blade for a caspo en perto.
Cazio voided to his right and counterthrust to Acredo’s eyes. Acredo ducked and lunged to Cazio’s foot, ending the attack as it had begun, except that Acredo’s blade plunged through Cazio’s numbed foot and into the chill soil below.
“The correct response?” Acredo asked, withdrawing his blooded blade and returning to guard.
Cazio winced. “Nicely done,” he allowed.
“My turn,” Acredo said, and commenced a flurry of feints and attacks.
“The cuckold’s walk home,” Cazio said, recognizing the technique. He replied with the appropriate counter, but again Acredo seemed to know one more move than he, and this time the exchange nearly ended with Acredo’s blade in Cazio’s throat.
Z’Acatto, you old fox, he thought. The old man had left out the final countermoves of Espedio’s set pieces. That had never mattered before, because until now Cazio had never met anyone else who had mastered the old master’s style; he had always managed to make his touch halfway through them. That wouldn’t work here; in fact, it was an almost certain route to failure. Cazio would have to use his own tricks.
