The Black Bouquet r-2

by Richard Lee Byers

  Aeron dragged himself out from underneath the carcass, then sat until he stopped panting and shivering. He was used to fighting people, even if he didn't often enjoy it, but demons were another matter.

  Still, he'd bested the vile thing, and it was time to see what his victory had gained him. Trying to brush away the sludge the spirit had puked onto his tunic, he strode back to the sundered halves of the broken strongbox.

  His prize lay in the padded bottom section, where it fit snugly. It was a big, old-looking book bound in black.

  As he reached for it, it occurred to Aeron that perhaps he still hadn't reached the end of the wards. But shadows of Mask, he'd already contended with the warning screech, the glimmering that neutralized his invisibility, spells of locking, thunderclaps, and a guardian imp. Surely even the most cautious shipper would have deemed those protections sufficient, and in any case, Aeron was simply too impatient to muck around with Burgell's tools and powders any longer. He picked up the book, and nothing disastrous happened as a result.

  The tome had a title embossed on the cover and spine with a few flecks of gold leaf still clinging to the letters, but since Aeron couldn't read, that was no help. His father had sometimes encouraged him to learn, but it had always seemed like a lot of effort for a minimal return.

  His best guess was that he'd stolen a wizard's grimoire, for what other kind of book could be valuable enough to warrant such elaborate defenses? But he'd handled a couple of those in his time, and when he leafed through it, he didn't find the elaborate pentagrams and illustrations of mystical hand gestures he was expecting.

  What he did discover were lines of text, pictures of leaves and flowers, and a hundred smells, many exquisitely sweet, faint yet still perceptible even through the musty, nose-tickling odor of aged, decaying parchment.

  The dark street was narrow, and the towers crowded close on either side. Miri found it oppressive. Considering that she was comfortable in even the deepest reaches of primordial forests like the Chondalwood, with gigantic mossy trees looming all around, it was ridiculous, but true nonetheless.

  Well, at least she had a patch of open sky above her head once more and hope of completing her mission without the necessity of a return to the claustrophobic confines of the Underways. In fact, if she could only ease her mind on a certain matter, she might feel better than at any time since Aeron sar Randal made off with the saddlebag.

  The problem was figuring out how to broach the subject with a comrade who'd been nothing but helpful, who had, indeed, saved her life. As a general rule, Miri believed in directness, yet she had a sense that in that situation, she'd feel like an ingrate if she failed to muster a degree of tact.

  "I still can't make out how you knew," she said as they hiked along.

  "About Mistress Dalaeve's face?" Sefris replied.

  "Yes."

  "We Broken Ones can see through illusions sometimes. Open eyes are a benefit of our meditations." As they neared an intersection, Sefris pointed to a frieze of manticores decorating a crumbling wall and said, "This is where our informant told us to turn."

  Miri peered around the corner, studying the path ahead. Even up in what was allegedly the law-abiding part of Oeble, it appeared to her that an absurd number of folk were skulking about in the dark, engaged in business that, were it wholly legitimate, they would have conducted by day. But none of them looked like they were lying in wait for outlanders, so she and the monastic proceeded on their way.

  "But how did you know she was so worried about keeping her scars hidden that a threat to unmask her would break her will?" the ranger asked.

  Sefris shrugged and replied, "It was a guess, based on what we'd heard and seen. Her reclusiveness. The dim lighting and frilly furnishings. Her taste in reading matter, and the fact that the false visage she affected was absolutely perfect, like a statue's face."

  "Very clever," said Miri.

  His cane tapping and bowl outstretched, a stained strip of linen tied over his eyes, a beggar meandered toward the two women. Reminded of sar Randal's disguise, Miri scowled, and the "blind" mendicant, who evidently saw her forbidding expression perfectly well, veered off.

  "Thank you," Sefris said. "Yet I sense you don't wholly approve of my tactics."

  "It's not that, exactly. I suppose I'm trained to fight with my hands, not by finding a person's private shame and rubbing salt in the wound. It just felt dirty, somehow."

  Sefris arched an eyebrow and said, "I intended to master the wizard through the exercise of our martial skills. You stopped me."

  "Because unlike the yuan-ti, who tried to enslave me, she hadn't done anything that made her fair game."

  "Operating a haven for the foulest kind of outlaws and goblin-kin doesn't qualify?"

  "It seems like it should," Miri said with a sigh, "doesn't it?"

  "Yet you pity her." To her surprise, Miri thought she heard a trace of scorn in the monastic's generally calm, mild tone, and she wondered if it was directed at Naneetha or herself. "Consider this, then. Suppose something scarred you. Would you spend the rest of your life hiding in a hole?"

  "No. It wouldn't make all that much difference to me, I suppose."

  "Nor me, nor anyone who wasn't bloated with vanity to begin with. Whatever distress Mistress Dalaeve experiences is the result of her own stupidity and weakness. You and I are not to blame."

  "And your deity is tender Ilmater, god of mercy," said Miri with wry incredulity.

  "Whose sympathy and help are given first and foremost to the innocent and those who strive for the right like you, my friend, and the good folk who you say will benefit when we recover your stolen treasure. There. That's it, isn't it?"

  The scout peered and saw that Sefris was right. Ahead and to the left were the broken foundations of two spires, like decaying stumps in a row of teeth. One tower had evidently fallen sideways, demolishing its neighbor in the course of its collapse. Imagining the catastrophe, Miri winced at the probable loss of life.

  But it had happened long ago, and all those unfortunate souls were beyond her power to help. What mattered then was that if her informant, one of Oeble's apothecaries, had told the truth, Aeron sar Randal lived on the top floor of a tower three doors farther down.

  Miri and Sefris stalked forward, stepping silently and gliding through the shadows. The ranger spotted a hobgoblin lurking in a recessed doorway, its cloak draped so that it half concealed the crossbow dangling in its hairy hand. She stopped and raised her hand, whereupon Sefris, too, halted instantly. Miri pointed.

  "A lookout," she whispered.

  "Yes, I see it now. Aeron's sentry, do you think?"

  "It's possible, but it feels wrong. At the Paeraddyn, his accomplices were all human, and if I understood Naneetha correctly, he doesn't even belong to a gang himself. He might not have any partners as a general rule."

  "Well, whoever it is, it's likely no friend of ours, not unless you have other allies you haven't told me about."

  "No," Miri replied.

  "I can't fling a chakram that far, but you can surely hit it with an arrow."

  Miri reached for a shaft, then left it in the quiver.

  "I can't just kill it without knowing for certain who it is or what it's doing," she said. "It might be working with the Gray Blades."

  "A hobgoblin?"

  "I know it seems unlikely, but Oeble is full of townsfolk the rest of the world disdains as savage marauders. Maybe some of them even spy for the law."

  "What should we do, then?" Sefris asked. "Creep around to the back of the tower and look for another way in, one the watcher can't see?"

  "I'll do that. You keep an eye on the hobgoblin and this approach, and hoot like an owl if you need to alert me to anything."

  Sefris smiled and said, "I remind you, this isn't the wild."

  "They must have a few owls," Miri replied. "Anyway, we need some sort of signal."

  She started toward the alley that ran between the two buildings, and the door to Aeron's to
wer opened.

  Several ruffians, a couple human, the others not, skulked out onto the street. The one in the lead was a tanarukk, the first of that infamous breed Miri had noticed among Oeble's motley population. Stooped and massive, curved tusks jutting from its lower jaw, it stalked along with a heavy battle-axe in one fist and a lead line in the other.

  The trailing end of the rope bound the hands of a human prisoner, who hobbled as best he could with a burlap sack over his head. For a moment, Miri wondered if it was Aeron, then decided it couldn't be. The captive was excruciatingly gaunt, not lean, and carried an assortment of old scars on the exposed portions of his skin.

  The hobgoblin lookout emerged from the doorway to join his comrades. Miri laid an arrow across her bow.

  Sefris touched her on the arm.

  "What are you doing?" she whispered.

  Miri was surprised that a Broken One, sworn to help the victims of cruelty, would ask.

  "I'm going to shoot an outlaw or two," the ranger replied.

  "Why? We don't know this is any of our affair. The toughs and goblin-kin look villainous enough, but perhaps they have some legitimate grievance against this man."

  "Then let them go to the law with their complaint. I thought that's what towns are supposed to be good for."

  "How many acts of injustice and brutality have you seen since coming to Oeble?" asked Sefris. "How many chained thralls wailing that they were enslaved unlawfully? How many pimps beating their whores and bravos terrorizing shopkeepers for protection? Yet you passed on by, because you're on a mission, and if you deviated from it to right every wrong you stumbled across in this den of scoundrels, you'd never get it done."

  "Maybe we don't have to close our eyes every time."

  "Something about the plight of this particular wretch has stirred your sympathy, but surely your guild masters taught you that mere emotion is no reason to abandon a strategy."

  "I admit, they did, but…"

  Uncertain, hating Sefris a little but herself more, Miri watched the kidnappers, if that was what they were, lead their captive away.

  "All right," Miri said when the street was clear, "let's get this done."

  She promised herself that once it was, and she'd delivered the strongbox into the proper hands, she'd depart Oeble within the hour, never to return. Unless it was at the head of an army, to raze the filthy place.

  She and Sefris scurried into the tower and on up the shadowy spiral stairs. The risers were soft, treacherous, half rotten, but they managed the climb quietly even so. On the third-floor landing, a door opened, and a halfling in a feathered hat started to emerge. He took one look at the two grim-faced human strangers striding by and retreated back inside.

  The door to Aeron sar Randal's garret apartment was standing open. Miri and Sefris ascended the remaining stairs warily, then they peeked beyond the threshold. Someone had torn the flat apart. At first the exercise had likely been a search, but had included simple malicious destruction before it was through. Shards of shattered bottles littered the floor, and the varnished scraps of a broken mandolin lay in the reeking puddle of spilled wine.

  No one was inside, though Miri was reasonably certain she'd seen the vandals only minutes before.

  "Look," Sefris said, pointing. The light of the garret's one surviving lamp sufficed to reveal the outline of an axe scrawled in crimson chalk on the wall. "The Red Axes signed their work."

  "And plainly," Miri said, "it was them we saw coming out of the tower with their prisoner. Otherwise, the coincidence is just too great. Curse us, we should have waylaid them."

  "Perhaps so," the monastic replied, "but let's take a moment to think it through. Who do you think they abducted, Aeron's father?"

  "Somebody dear to him, at any rate, someone they hope to trade for the box."

  "Not a bad idea, and if we take the hostage from them, we can try the same thing."

  Miri frowned and said, "We're not kidnappers, to hold a man prisoner and barter his life for treasure."

  "Do you think the captive an innocent? My guess is that he's as wicked a knave as Aeron himself, for what bond of affection could exist between such a thief and a righteous man?"

  "We can't mistreat him just on the basis of our suspicions."

  "No," Sefris sighed. "Of course not. What was I thinking? I think this evil place is corrupting my judg-"

  Without warning, she leaped and spun, her heel streaking at Miri's head.

  Reacting out of sheer reflex, Miri bounded back out of range, and the monastic's kick missed her by an inch. The scout continued her frantic retreat, meanwhile nocking and drawing an arrow. Sefris landed in a deep crouch, one hand high and open, the other clenched into a fist and cocked at her hip.

  "What is this?" Miri demanded. "Why would you attack me?"

  "The arcanaloth promised you'd guide me along the path to the Bouquet," Sefris replied, "but I think you've done your part. From this point onward, your mawkish scruples and squeamishness would only get in the way. So now I'm going to kill you for daring to set yourself against the Lady of Loss."

  Miri didn't understand all of that. She didn't know what an "arcanaloth" was, for example. But it was plain that Sefris was as treacherous a double-dealer as most everyone else she'd met in Oeble, and had been playing her for a fool from the start.

  "I'm the one with an arrow aimed at your heart," Miri said. "If you so much as twitch, I'll let it fly. Now, you're no Broken One. Who are you?"

  "Perhaps you've heard of the Monks of the Dark Moon."

  Sefris's hand leaped toward her pocket and the chakram inside it. Miri released the bowstring.

  The arrow flew straight, but the monastic twisted aside. The chakram whirled through the air. Miri simultaneously ducked and flailed at the ring, and by luck as much as skill, she swatted it away with her buckler. Steel clashed against steel.

  Sefris pounced, too fast for even the deftest archer to ready another shaft. In desperation, Miri swung her bow like a club. The monastic caught the weapon, twirled it out of Miri's grasp, and cast it aside.

  At least that took an instant, which Miri used to scramble backward once more. The retreat took her out onto the balcony, which groaned and dipped alarmingly under her weight. She also had time to snatch out her broadsword and, when Sefris lunged forward again, prompting the platform to creak and lurch, meet her with a stop cut. The robed, shaven-headed woman halted instantly, cleanly, on balance, and the attack fell short.

  Smiling ever so slightly, Sefris shifted back and forth, looking for an opening. Miri felt an unaccustomed pang of fear, and struggled to quash it.

  I know she's good, she thought, but the sword gives me the reach on her, and she can't dodge around too much out here. The balcony's too small.

  Miri advanced, feinted to the head, and cut to the flank. Sefris ignored the false attack and swept down her arm to parry the true one. It shouldn't have worked very well. The broadsword should have chopped into her wrist, but the block incorporated a subtle spinning motion that somehow permitted her to fling the blade away and remain unscathed.

  She riposted with a spring into the air and a front kick to the face. Miri swayed backward, out of harm's way, and slashed at the other woman's extended leg. She grazed the flapping hem of her robe, but that was all. Sefris touched down, spun, and caught the sword with a crescent kick. The impact tore it from Miri's grasp and sent it flying over the broken railing.

  The ranger grabbed for the hilt of the dagger sheathed at her belt. Hands poised for slaughter, Sefris whirled around to face her.

  Wood cracked and screamed, and the balcony swung down, the horizontal surface becoming a steep incline. The platform was pulling loose from it anchors.

  Sefris turned and, nimble as a cat, clambered up the slope and into the safety of the garret. Miri tried to do the same, but scrabble as she might, she couldn't catch hold of anything to pull herself up. Her boots kicked away rotten fragments of railing, wood cracked and snapped, and she and the ba
lcony plummeted, tumbling through empty space.

  CHAPTER 9

  As the crash sounded below, Sefris drew a calming breath. She hadn't feared Miri's bow or sword, but she had felt a twinge of alarm when the balcony unexpectedly gave way. The fear proved she still had a way to go before she achieved a perfect, contemptuous indifference to the well-being of all unworthy created things, herself included.

  It was something to work on in her meditations, but not just then. She had to recapture the opportunity that was receding beyond her grasp. The monastic retrieved her fallen chakram, she then sprinted back down the spiral stairs.

  As Sefris hurtled downward, she cast off-she wished for all time-the habits of speech and expression she'd adopted to impersonate a Broken One. The warmth and compassion of a servant of Ilmater were entirely alien to her own nature. It had taken a constant effort to counterfeit them, and she knew she hadn't managed perfectly. Still, she'd passed muster right up until the end, and that was what mattered.

  When she reached ground level, she raced down the street in the direction the kidnappers and their victim had taken. She kept to the shadows as best she could, but stealth was less important than speed, and her sandals pounded the wheel-rutted earth.

  Indeed, she'd nearly passed the narrow cul-de-sac before she registered the stairs at the end of it, like a well lined with steps twisting downward into the ground. When she spotted it, however, she stopped cold.

  The part of Oeble that knew rain and sunlight did possess some semblance of law and order, no matter how corrupt or ineffectual, so it seemed unlikely that outlaws dragging a prisoner along would opt to continue in the streets when they could descend to the Underways instead. Sefris bounded down the narrow, unrailed steps, indifferent to the possibility of a fall. Her Dark Moon training had honed her sense of balance to such a degree that the rapid descent was no more difficult than sprinting on level ground.