Then, a whirl of lights and sound, and both men were in a different setting. Smiling now was agony, but Kittins did so, anyway: the Shaper had tried to magic himself out of the captain’s grip and failed.
Again the setting changed. Kittins held fast. A tremendous force buffeted against the captain, and still he would not let go of the Shaper’s throat. Now, Cindor howled and beat Kittins about the head and shoulders in a panic.
Abruptly, the fire went out, and Kittins discovered that neither he nor his severely damaged adversary could move. Darkness took both men.
~ FOUR ~
The Alchemist, In the Castle
The eyes of the head in the cupboard scanned the ceiling as if listening for footsteps on the floor above. From there, they moved to the door and from thence to a spot in the center of the room. The mouth pulled into a smug little grin. Shortly, a whirling speck of blackness appeared in the air above that spot and started to grow. In no time, it was the size of a window, large enough for a man to pass through. And so a man passed through, or most of one, anyway. A headless body clad in dark robes stepped clumsily through the blackness and into the room, whereupon the mysterious portal dissipated completely. The body straightened and turned about several times, like a lost traveler attempting to get his bearings. The head whistled noiselessly through pursed lips and the body, hearing the uncanny, silent trill, spun and ambled towards it, whereupon both parts were reunited. The hands set the head back in its place atop the neck with a wet slurp and made final adjustments to its attitude.
The alchemist was whole again. And inside the castle.
He smiled and then began to fade, becoming a feeble shadow, a paucity of light.
*****
Long & Company, In Camp
The camp had been going stir-crazy. All Long and his boys had to do was give it a little nudge and the resultant hurly-burly took on a life of its own. Bear Man’s friends slogged through the snow to rouse as many of their fellow campers as possible, and the ever-growing rumors and conjectures about the pending attack by Gorivar’s men enflamed the righteous indignation of any and all who might otherwise have contemplated neutrality.
In a mad rush, the boisterous throng of campers set off up the hill in the direction of Gorivar’s cabin, brandishing burning limbs from the bonfire, hammers, pikes, drover’s whips or whatever else came to hand in addition to the usual assortment of weapons. The campers made no effort at stealth, but roared and bellowed, cursed and howled their way to the cabin.
The men on guard had been put there in response to the baffling deaths of two of their number and not, as Long had claimed, as prelude to an attack on the camp; however, they were the sort of mercenaries who were well used to arousing the ire of those they oppressed, and so were not especially surprised when the Bear Man’s mob came raging towards them out of the frozen night. Or, if they were surprised, it was pleasantly so, as they were also the kind of men for whom inactivity was agony and a good fight was better than sex. In their eagerness to engage their attackers, the guards failed to alert their master, charging, instead, headlong into the approaching wave of enemies.
Long was amazed at the clarity with which he perceived all of this as well as the ease with which he had engineered it. He had not, of late, been much used to success and had become wary of anything that smelled remotely like it. Somehow, he feared, this little raid to unseat Gorivar would be Long’s undoing. Somehow, it would explode all over him, like something out the back of a dyspeptic cow. Everything in life seemed to do that nowadays.
The majority of the campers were drunk (else they might not have undertaken such a foolhardy task), and Gorivar’s guards were not. Most of the campers were not particularly skilled with weapons, and Gorivar’s men had years of experience. In their favor, though, the men of the camp had superior numbers and were more rested than their opponents.
In the area around the cabin, the conflict looked like a war of shadows, between shadows. It was difficult to tell friend from foe, except that the Bear Man’s crew continued to holler, grunt and boast, whilst Gorivar’s guards fought mostly in silence.
It was this difference that allowed Ron to choose targets for his bow and arrows. Yes, he’d famously shot himself in the foot once, but he’d no interest in getting close enough for sword work.
Spirk, too, stayed towards the back of the assault, trying to determine how best to contribute.
Yendor fought to keep up with Long and privately worried about the lack of light. Having only one eye, his depth perception suffered mightily in the dark. He had little confidence in his ability to parry an incoming blow, should the need present itself.
Rem pushed his worries aside. There was no profit in second-guessing himself now. All that mattered was surviving the present, and seeing that his friends did, too.
Long Pete was everywhere, hacking, stabbing and slashing like a man possessed. For weeks – months? – he’d been swallowing his emotions, his despair, his rage, and now that he had occasion to vent, to exorcise the demons that tormented him, he swept through the fracas like a butcher’s mechanical meat grinder. He took injuries, of course, but those he meted out were far greater in number and severity. The silhouettes of nameless guards became the embodiment of everything that had hurt Long over the years, and he punished them accordingly. He was no master swordsman, but in the darkness and chaos of combat, he might just as well have been. Fleetingly, he marveled at this strange transformation that had turned him from a soft and middling officer into an avatar of destruction. What in the infinite hells was happening to him?
During a brief lull in which he’d been unable to find an adversary, Long saw that the dead were piling up on both sides. Through a small stand of trees, he caught a glimpse of Bear Man, pounding someone’s skull to paste. In the other direction, a camper and guard rolled on the ground, grappling for any advantage that might end that one exchange and free the victor for the next challenger. Most surprising, to Long’s eye, was that the path to the cabin’s front door was free and clear. It might be a trap, the captain warned himself. And then: fuck it. Might Be’s never been a friend to me! The captain put two fingers to his lips and whistled in Yendor and Rem’s direction
They stumbled to his side. He simply pointed at the unobstructed front door.
“Where’s Spirk and that other fella?” Yendor gasped.
“Right here!” Spirk protested, thumping himself a little too hard on the chest and gesticulating at Ron. “And don’t start tellin’ me you didn’t see me. That’s only for enemies!”
“Well,” Yendor answered, “in fairness…” He pointed to his eye patch.
“What’s the plan?” Rem asked, cutting through the banter.
“We rush the place and focus our attacks on the monster.”
“Monster?” cried Spirk, alarmed.
“Gorivar,” Yendor clarified.
“Right,” said Long. “We kill him, his men should lose their enthusiasm for the job.”
The captain made a special point of looking everyone in the eye. He wanted everyone in agreement, everyone in unison. They were a terribly small force, and if even one of them wandered off on his own…It didn’t bear thinking on. “Let’s go,” he said.
As hoped, they had no trouble reaching the entrance with everything else going on. Long swept aside the curtain of skins that served as a door in the newly remodeled opening and led his crew inside.
Gorivar lay sprawled on an enormous pile of furs atop the former occupant’s bed, wearing an expression of irritation but not anger. “I mighta guessed,” he drawled, and before Long or any of his companions could so much as lift a finger, they rushed towards the ceiling and crashed into it with great force. Everyone except Spirk, that is. Then, following the pattern they’d all seen before, they fell to the floor with an equally great crash.
“You stop that right now!” Spirk yelled at the gelatinous tyrant on the bed.
The group smashed into the ceiling again, with a chorus of grun
ts and cries.
“Do something, boy!” Long yelled from the rafters.
Long and company fell again. Spirk noticed, to his horror, that Yendor was bleeding from a split lip and Rem seemed unable to open his left eye.
“Stop doin’ that!” Spirk screamed at Gorivar, who laughed heartily in response, so that his whole body giggled like pudding.
“Or what?” the fat man gloated.
Whereupon he, too, shot to the ceiling. Because of his mass, however, he crashed right through the roof and disappeared into the night. Snowflakes and splinters were all that returned though the ragged hole he’d made.
Long looked up from the floor and saw that Spirk’s face had turned an unhealthy shade of crimson, and his mouth had pulled into a small, tight line. With some effort, the captain got to his feet and staggered into a position just shy of the hole. He stared at it. “Shouldn’t he be coming back this way?” he wondered aloud.
A very loud, very wet thud sounded outside the entrance. Everyone turned in that direction, consumed with the same question: was that…?
Ron ran to the door, slipped past the skins, and was gone. “It’s him!” his voice called from outside. “Gods, what a mess!”
The group felt powerfully tempted to stare at its erstwhile Shaper, but no one dared. He seemed in a fragile mood, to say nothing of the fact he’d just thrown a thousand pound man through a ceiling and into the sky beyond. Long rather conspicuously pondered his own feet, whilst simultaneously marveling at the change in his young friend. Time was, the boy couldn’t have counted to two without getting lost on the way to one. Now? He’d become every bit as strange as the monster he’d just killed. He’d become someone capable of turning enemies to crystal, or ice, or, as the current case seemed to suggest, jelly.
“One o’ you boys did that?” the Bear Man called from the doorway.
Not wanting to tip his hand, Long simply nodded.
“I never seen the like of it,” the other man said, shaking his head in disbelief. “Whoreson brute went crashin’ right through the roof an’ up into the sky. Right through the roof, I say, like sparks up a chimney, and then down into the snow. Never heard a sound like that, neither.”
Long moved closer, placing himself between the Bear Man and the young Shaper. “He’s dead, though, and that’s all that matters.”
“What o’ the rest of ‘em?”
The captain slid past the larger man and peered out into the night. There were few men on either side left alive, but the guards that remained quickly appraised their chances of survival and concluded, predictably, that they needed to demonstrate that they held no lingering allegiance to the dead tyrant, and so turned on each other. Safety lay with whoever had killed Gorivar, and loyalty be damned.
Long, Bear Man, and the rest of the campers let the guards go at it. Eventually, only two remained. They dropped their weapons and stood where they were, hoping that somehow their actions had earned them another sunrise.
Bear Man turned back to Long and his crew, an eager glint in his eye. “And the spoils?”
“You and your friends can have the lot, whatever you find.”
Bear Man couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “The lot? Mahnus’ balls, man, that’s the cabin, everything in the cabin, everything on these dead, and everything our dead mates’ve left back at camp.”
“The lot,” Long confirmed. “My boys and me are leavin’ soon as the skies clear and the snow abates.” Having nothing more to say, he nodded at his comrades and turned back toward his own campsite.
The bloodstained snow he traversed along the way reminded him too well of another, larger and more desperate battle he’d once fought in snow. Try as he might, he could not avoid thinking about his old friend Janks, how Long had killed him, and how Janks had somehow risen from the grave. Bad as that was, the man had lost all memory of his previous life. He was alive now, yes, but the friendship, the history, the bond between the two men had disappeared like an ill-remembered dream, something that had only seemed real in the moment, but which faded with the rising sun. And so, Long had abandoned the new Janks to his fortune in the capital, but not before Long offered the same good wishes he’d have extended to any stranger.
But why had Janks come back in the first place? How was it possible? When Long needed escape from the guilt and grief that tormented him over Mardine’s death and his daughter’s abduction, his mind invariably sought out what he thought of as the ‘Janks Conundrum.’ But although he’d spent countless hours going over and over these questions, he never got any closer to understanding. He wondered if he was cursed, in some way, to spend the rest of his life approaching but never arriving, gaining on, but never grasping.
If that proved the case with Esmine…
*****
Kittins, In Lunessfor
Kittins had never imagined that opening one’s eyes could be so painful. His charred lids creaked and crackled just wide enough to allow him to acknowledge Her Majesty’s jibe, and then he closed them again.
“Yes,” the old bitch sniped, “I get more thoughtful service out of my livestock.”
“I’d heal faster. If I had. A little peace. And quiet,” Kittins rasped.
“You’ll find no shortage of either in the grave,” Her Majesty quipped. “Which is where you seem bent on going, in spite of that amulet you wore.”
Wore? That got Kittins’ attention. Once again, he forced his eyes open, only to see the Queen grinning at him.
“I haven’t taken it, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She paused for dramatic effect. “No. It seems to have sunken into your chest, strangely. If you could move your hands, you’d feel it right under that bacon you call skin.” Again, Her Majesty paused, thinking. “It’s a curiously powerful object, that amulet. Well beyond the abilities of a mere swamp witch, and I wonder: why give it to you?”
“Is there. Any. Water?” Kittins asked.
A pair of hands appeared on the left side of his head. A ladle made its presence known against his lips – or whatever was left of them. Much of the water trickled through his teeth and down his chin.
“The A’Shea have been attending you constantly. You might thank them, when you have a moment,” the Queen said archly. “Now, what was I…? Ah, yes: you and my Shaper are done fighting. Am I understood? Nobody cares which of you can piss the farthest.”
“Then he’s. Still alive,” Kittins managed.
“Of course he’s alive, you big oaf! I go to great pains to protect my assets – which include you, by the way – and I won’t have you doing any more damage to one another. There are bigger things at stake here than your laughable need to be cock-of-the-walk!”
If she said more, Kittins missed it, lapsing into unconsciousness before he was even aware it was happening.
There was less pain the next time he awoke, but his eyelids still creaked when he opened them, a sound reminiscent of a man shifting in the saddle.
“Drink,” a voice said softly, and the ladle reappeared near his mouth.
This time, Kittins caught a glimpse of his Mender and offered his thanks. She said not a word in response, but nodded in acknowledgement.
Beyond her, Kittins saw another body in a second bed. Cindor. Her Majesty had put them in the same room! In a castle the size of a small city, with hundreds and hundreds of rooms, she’d put the two men in the same bloody room. Of course she had!
As if he’d been following Kittins’ thoughts, the Shaper turned his head – with some difficulty, Kittins was pleased to note – and glared at him. The hatred was still there, burning as brightly as ever, if the actual flames that had scarred both men were not. Kittins glared right back at his nemesis and saw great bruises along the man’s neck. On either side of these were gruesome burns that spread either up or down for a good ten to twelve inches. The Shaper’s face was burned to his nose, making him look as if he were wearing a mask of some sort. His lips were swollen and misshapen, but in better shape than Kittins’ nonetheless.
“Cat. Got. Your tongue?” Kittins croaked.
In lieu of a response, Cindor continued to stare.
“Fuckin’ Shapers,” Kittins muttered. “No sense. Of humor.”
Later, Kittins woke in excruciating pain. Someone was shredding his skin to…An A’Shea was gently cleaning his burns with a wet cloth, but each stroke felt, to the captain, as if he were being flayed alive.
“Stop!” he barked.
An aged and familiar hand came into view from his right side and touched Kittins on the chest, whereupon the pain disappeared immediately.
“You will be nice,” the Queen commanded, her voice level and calm, “or the pain you’ve felt will seem pleasant in comparison to what’s coming.” She lifted her hand, and proved her point: Kittins screamed in agony. Her Majesty’s hand returned to his chest: the pain vanished. She raised her hand again: the pain returned. She restored her hand a final time.
Gasping for breath, Kittins squawked, “You’re an A’Shea?”
A faint upturn at the corner of the Queen’s mouth was the only evidence of her amusement. “You could say that. And so I don’t take kindly to anyone abusing my staff, especially when they’ve devoted untold hours making you comfortable.”
Kittins shot a glance over at Cindor, who appeared to have been smirking throughout this exchange. Returning his attention to Her Majesty, Kittins asked, “How bad is it?”
“I was under the impression you didn’t care about such things.” The Queen waited for Kittins to confirm or deny her assessment, but he said nothing. Eventually, she went on. “You won’t die, if that’s what you’re worrying about. In fact, you’re healing better and faster than expected, and you already know why. But I very much doubt you’ll ever reclaim your boyish good looks. There’s only so much your little amulet can accomplish.”
“So I’ll be even. Uglier than before.”
“Vanity, Captain? You surprise me.”
Corpse Cold (Immortal Treachery Book 3) Page 11
