by RW Krpoun
When he finished drinking the Healer produced a silk cloth and a small vial. Using the cloth, and being extremely careful not to come in contact with the fluid, she spread the oil across his chest and ribs, the substance fading away with a cool sensation, not unlike that of an alcohol rub.
“That should do nicely,” the man smiled when she had finished. “We’ll wait around an hour, and then I’ll explain the specifics of your new situation.”
“I’m certainly not going to cross you,” Loudon assured him.
“There’s a lie, but I’ll spot you one; another’ll cost you a plum,” the man smiled without humor. “The substance you just swallowed and absorbed is a two-stage poison, a very complex and expensive one. After roughly an hour your body will begin to stiffen until the joints are completely locked. Convulsions working against this rigidity will then tear your body apart in a slow and particularly gruesome manner. This can only be stopped by a draft prepared by this specific Healer; in order to work, after completion the draft must be held by this Healer, myself, and two persons not currently present. The draft will hold the effect at bay for twelve hours, which will not be sufficient time for your ex-masters to devise a cure. Naturally, we will be happy to give you two doses per day, delivered one at a time, providing we have your full and unswerving devotion. Of course, we don’t expect you to believe us on faith; we’ll wait under the convulsions are underway before administering the draft we brought with us. In the meantime we will discuss how the drafts are to be delivered and how we shall communicate. Later we’ll discuss what you know of Hand operations in Sagenhoft in no small detail.” The man regarded Loudon with eyes as cold as a frozen river. “Treat fairly with us, and we’ll provide you with an antidote for the poison that will purge it from your body; break your pledge to us, and you will die very badly.”
Staring at the man, Loudon began to believe that things might not be as simple as he had first thought.
An hour later he became absolutely convinced.
There were too many decisions to be made, too many reports to read, and too few hours in the day. Arthol Mane knew he was cutting corners, working too hard on too little sleep, but there was no choice in it; he was the general of a shadow army locked in a half-seen battle. Arrayed against him were patrols of clumsy, half-witted soldiers and the partially-trained spy-hunters of the Duchy’s young Green Bureau, hardly deadly foes but for the confined areas in which they fought and the revalation of his general plans by the half-breed bitch, Meredith.
Despite the foe knowing the general direction of his thrusts, things were going fairly well: the program to strain the city’s resources by acts of arson were proceeding well; enemy patrols and ambushes bagged many a fire-team, but the arsonists were hirelings drawn from the desperate amongst the refugees, completely expendable types, and not a night passed without three or four targets burning. The rat-plague was faltering in the face of the city’s strong counter-measures and the dedicated searching for the rat-farms, however: to date he was losing five farms a week, but he was not yet ready to discontinue the effort, especially since everyone at the farm level were refugee hirelings, fully expendable.
The twin efforts to spread dissent amongst the refugees and city poor and to encourage factional struggles in the Duchy’s power circles were progressing smoothly and fully according to plan; they had not yet sparked riots of any reasonable size, but Arthol knew that a mob was a crop which took time to mature, and waited patiently. Aside from these four main thrusts, there was still the routine business of spy-craft and recruiting, sabotage in specific areas, and a hundred other minor operations that served to sap the foe’s strength and pave the way for the Hand’s successful entry into the city.
His entire organization was stretched to its utmost, every agent and associate urged on to greater efforts as the days slid past. Mane was clearly aware that to the north the Heartland Army was refitting, training, resting, and receiving fresh troops; six days ago, on the twentieth, the Baron of Kordia, who had been a widower for several years, had married the youngest sister of King Henry II of Ilthan; the latter worthy had then presented his new brother-in-law with command of the Ilthan forces, something no one in Bohca Tatbik was happy with, as Baron Noury was a hard-fighting realist who had distinguished himself to the east, and who would whip both Henry’s army and his own into fine shape if given a couple months. Worse, Noury was an open supporter of Laffery’s command of the Heartland Army.
He looked up tiredly when Markan-Fet of the Second Degree Herwood Tolver, his operations officer, stepped through the door, yet another report in hand. “Sorry to disturb you, sir, but you said we should afford this business with the captured artisan top priority.”
“Yes, what is it?” Arthol rubbed his eyes and poured himself a glass of brandy. He was drinking more than he should lately, but it was all that kept him going. He and his organization had been running full-tilt for twenty-six days now, with only weeks of hard labor to look forward to.
“Five days ago a minor associate reported he had come across information in the course of his duties as a Treasury clerk that might have some bearing on where the mercenaries are hiding her; in accordance with your orders we suspended him from other duties and assigned him to the section-leader tasked with finding her. Today he forwarded this report in which he pin-points the location to an old warehouse on the north docks. He also indicates that he fears this to be a trap or deception of some sort, although he has no real grounds to base this upon.”
“Let me see.” Mane studied the terse report. “At least he cuts to the meat of the matter, we’ve too many flowery prose-smiths these days. Tell me about this Loudon Simer.”
Tolver shrugged. “Never remarkable, but rock-steady, a plodder with more ambition than ability. When he was transferred five days ago I put a good woman to checking him out, and he came back clean, doesn't even dabble on the black market. Has a taste for whores, which could be how he got his information, but we’ve sent artisans in without his knowledge, and he isn’t one to talk too much after sex.”
“So he couldn’t have been turned?”
“Not a chance; he’s a local, so we can account for his entire life, and he’s too heavily compromised with us to ever switch sides. I wouldn’t vouch for him with a noose around his neck, but he couldn’t be intimidated and released.”
“We’ll act on his information, then.”
“Shall I set a loose net on this warehouse for a few days?”
“No, we can be confident that they shift her every few days; we’ll strike as soon as a force can be assembled.”
“To strike without reconnaissance is risky, sir: we could lose a team attacking in such a fashion,” Tolver objected. “And even Simer is concerned that this matter could be a trap.”
“Simer is a Treasury clerk who has more ambition than ability. Have you tried a Watcher?”
“Yes, sir,” the operations officer admitted reluctantly. “And it appears that Meredith is there, although not much else can be said, the mercenaries are aware of how to disrupt the Sight.”
“Everyone and his dog knows how to disrupt the Sight,” Mane observed peevishly. “I wonder why we even bother with them. Very well, we strike at once, tonight if possible. Use the Hobrec for the job, we should have a team of them close to hand.”
“Yes, sir, but the deception that lets us keep forty of them on the docks would be spoiled by their use,” Tolver pointed out.
“True, but I want that bitch’s head in a bucket of brandy here on my desk by dawn, and should this be a trap, two score of Hobrec will be more than our friends will be expecting.”
“Yes, sir,” Tolver sketched a salute and hurried from the room.
Mane stared into his brandy and wished for a single day’s relaxation, but every hour was precious. Sagenhoft had never fallen in all its centuries of occupation; so long as it held, the hopes of the Realms lived on. Let it fall, and the Realms would fall to the Hand.
He knew that his o
bsession with killing Meredith was not healthy in a professional sense, but she was a failing of his command that must be eradicated, a breach of his security that must be avenged. And it was not merely a lust for revenge that drove him: the thought of a Pargaie-trained and experienced professional advising the opposition chilled him to the bone.
Chapter Nineteen
Luella Blackthorn eyed the Hobrec slipping out from beneath the canvas shrouding the barge’s cargo hold and shuddered; they were a horrid lot, even when cloaked in darkness. As the reavers sorted themselves out one moved to join her in the shadows beneath a crane, leading a male Human on a leash.
“Hello, I’m an interpreter,” the man smiled crookedly, his teeth flashing in the pale light. “Not what I wanted out of life, but it beats working in a Hobrec shipyard until you die, which was the alternative. This is the detachment leader; his rank translates into ‘commander’, and will serve as a manner of address, as dealing with Hobrec names is a bit much for newcomers. Have you been watching the warehouse?” As he spoke, his eyes roved across her body.
“My people have, yes, for the last four hours. There has been no movement in or out, and our Watchers advise us that there cannot be more than four or five people inside, perhaps less.”
The interpreter chattered at the Poro, who answered in some length. “He’s surprised that you required the services of his unit, given the low numbers.”
“Tell him that these enemy will be drawn from the mercenaries his people faced in the Amphitheater; one of their officers slew a dozen Hobrec, I’m told.”
“He won’t like that,” the slave observed before translating. The Hobrec’s reply was much shorter. “He says you’ll come with us into the warehouse and point out the one we’re supposed to kill. You’ll be in the rear, of course.”
“I understand, and yes, those were my instructions.”
The slave spoke with the Poro, who snarled a curt reply and looped the leash’s end around one of the crane’s support poles before stalking off to his waiting warriors. “He says we’ll move in just a moment. After the fight we’ll be a few minutes in loading; I’d give this to spend the time getting a little sweetness.” The interpreter held up a necklace; even in the dim light of the moon Luella could see the bloody gleam of rubies.
“I suppose that could be arranged. Why don’t you just run for it?”
“I’ve seen them throw those stars too many times to chance it; they see in the dark like cats. Give me half a chance near some cover and I’ll be gone like a ferret down a hole. Here he comes again, cautious old bastard.”
The warehouse was a tall structure that had served many functions over the years, set back from the piers on the stony bluff a bit separated from its fellows, a weathered building that looked like a hundred others along the waterfront. There were double doors cunningly mounted on rails on the wide south side which faced the water, and an ordinary door on the narrow west side of the rectangular building. The windows had been securely boarded up years ago, and in truth the place looked largely abandoned but for the dim light that escaped around the doors. Luella’s scouts had verified that the small door was solid and well-bolted, while the ageing double doors were only poorly secured due to the warping effects of time.
The Poro positioned his troops with gestures and soft grunts; when all were in position, two reavers slid dagger-blades through the gaps between the doors and eased the bolts open while others spilled oil over the door-casters and the troughs they ran in. At their leader’s signal, the doors were flung open and the Hobrec swept in, weapons at the ready.
Luella followed closely behind the reavers, keenly aware that Meredith was reported to be a slippery type, already having been listed as dead once. Inside, the warehouse was a single long room lit by a dozen small lamps mounted on the wood support beams, the lights plunging the rafters and upper reaches of the peaked roof into absolute darkness. As the Hobrec fanned out into the room, which was empty save for a couple dozen old lantern-oil kegs, Luella stepped hastily to the side of the long doorway, gagging; apparently the place had been an oil storage for a long time, as the cloying stench of high-grade lantern oil hung thick in the room. The Hobrec didn’t seem to notice the smell, moving carefully across the creaking plank floor to peer into corners.
When one of the reavers kicked an oil-barrel, only to have the container echo emptily and yet remain fixed firmly in place, Luella began backing towards the door, noticing the interpreter doing the same; something was very wrong here. The Hobrec spun and raised their weapons as four barrels clattered down the narrow side-walls and pulleys howled overhead, but before anyone could react the plank floor collapsed from beneath their feet.
She landed on her rear in a foot of water, only to realize that it was not all water; rather, it was about a foot of water with two inches of coal-based lantern oil floating on top. She was leaping out of the ‘pond’, diving over the sill of the sliding doors and out onto the cobblestones when she saw the coils of blazing tarred rope being dumped out of a hot-box into the oily water by a hard-faced man crouched in the rafters.
Some of the burning rope-wicks went out when they hit the water-oil mix, but all it took was for one flame to catch, and at least one did. A sheet of flame roared across the surface of the water, and across the oil-splashed armor and clothing of the Hobrec thrashing to their feet in the pond. In an instant the interior of the warehouse was a brilliantly-lit hell filled with burning, howling humanoid figures.
Dropping the hot-box that had held the smoldering rope onto the solid plank flooring that surrounded the ‘pond’, Arian snatched up his crossbow and shot a riayet, or Hobrec junior Lieutenant in the chest, the impact of the bolt knocking the dying reaver off its feet and into the blazing embrace of the pond. Coughing in the clouds of swirling black smoke that poured up from the roaring flames, the monk, guiding himself by the ropes strung for the purpose, stepped to a trap door built into the ceiling and flung the portal open, scrambling out onto the crumbling tiles of the warehouse’s roof.
Luella rolled desperately across the filthy cobblestones in an attempt to extinguish her clothes and hair, tumbling across the roadway until she slammed into a pile of crates on the pier itself. She would have burned there but for someone racing up and beating out the flames with a water-soaked length of canvas. Finally the stinging, life-saving blows ceased and the dazed Hand associate struggled to a sitting position, only to have a booted foot slam into her solar plexus, doubling her over into a gagging ball as expert hands ran over her body, relieving her of all of her knives and both pouches. Her wrists were securely lashed together behind her and her elbows fastened to some sort of stick before she could recover her breath, and long before she was steady on her feet she being hustled into another warehouse four doors down from the target building. As she staggered, gasping for air, down the pier she looked back and saw the warehouse behind her engulfed in flame, those Hobrec who had managed to get clear of the deadly pond lying in and around the doorway, cut down by archers who had had plenty of light to work with. She wasn’t the only survivor, he saw: a red-haired, fox-faced man was hustling the interpreter along, bound just as she was.
The interior of the warehouse they hustled her into was dim and cool, smelling of fresh timber and old rope. Thumping her down onto a stool, her captor pinned her with a knee to the chest and bound her to a handy pillar with a length of rope before dragging Luella’s tunic and undershirt over her head, wringing a scream from the battered associate.
Her captor was a woman Luella saw in the dim light of a single candle as her clothing was wrenched over her head, a robust lass with good bones and two yataghans worn cross-draw. “I ought to tell you I’m not interested in women,” she gasped as the undertunic finally cleared her head.
“That makes two of us,” the woman smiled. “This is hardly what you would expect.”
The gray dawn light was washing over the dancing waves as the stars winked out and the morning scents rose from the water. Arth
ol Mane leaned against a walkway and watched the gulls floating in serene squadrons, two bodyguards hovering just out of earshot. “So it was in fact a trap.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, sir,” Luella nodded tiredly; the filthy, battered associate was too sore to be in awe of her station chief at the moment. Every joint and ligament hurt, half of her hair was a fuzzy mass an inch from her scalp, and reddish burns covered the left side of her face and neck. “We walked into it like lambs to a slaughter.”
“Tell me exactly how it happened.” She had met the station commander, whose name she didn’t know, only once before, when she had been assigned this task; he was handsome, in an arrogant sort of way, lean featured and brooding, the sort she would be interested in under different circumstances.
“I scouted the position with four artisans. After we had learned what we could I sent the four to a nearby ship where they would be out of the way, and contacted the Hobrec. I went in at the back of the formation; inside the warehouse the Badgers had dug a two-foot-deep pond, for lack of a better word, directly into the stone the warehouse was built upon, and sealed it with tar. They put a plank floor over it using aged boards; they had some sort of pulley system set up so that when a man in the rafters released a lever four barrels filled with ballast dropped out of the rafters pulling chains like a clock’s weights. The chain-pull jerked out the greased dowels that held the floor together and dumped nearly everyone into the pond, which had a foot of water in it with lots of oil floating on the water.”
“Continue.”
“I was at the very edge of the pond nearest the door; I managed to get out and roll, putting out the fire on myself. Archers cut down everyone that made it out of the warehouse.” She gestured at her left arm, which was in a sling. “I took an arrow through the shoulder, but they apparently were more concerned with the Hobrec. I hid until the fire attracted enough attention for me to slip back to my four people, who bound my wound. Later we went back to check the area and found a small keg with the Phantom Badger insignia burned into the wood; inside we found the head of Meredith preserved in rum. I’m no expert, but she’s been dead for quite a while.”
