by Dorian Hart
Tig tightened his lips and said nothing.
Morningstar pointed to Haske’s body. “That man over there. How did he know who we were?”
Her prisoner stared straight ahead and did not answer.
“Fine,” said Morningstar. “Tor, untie his right arm, and you and Kibi hold it down on the table. That way, if he doesn’t answer the next time I ask the question, I can smash his hand to a pulp.”
Tor unwound the rope. She knew the boy was only complying because he thought she was bluffing. Kibi offered her a questioning look, which she ignored.
“One more time,” said Morningstar. “How…?”
“He read your mind,” said Tig quickly. “I don’t know how. Some wizardry he knows. I’ve seen him do it before. Part of the recruitment process. He warned us something like this might happen, but you’re the first people he ever told us to snuff.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Morningstar. It was far more likely that these men had received warning from Tal Hae after Praska had escaped, as Dranko had feared. As soon as Tor admitted where they were from, Haske had decided to take no chances.
Tig looked down nervously at his pinioned hand. “Believe what you like, but it’s the truth.”
Morningstar changed her opinion slightly. Tig probably thought his confederate could read minds.
“Was your mind-reader in charge of this whole archaeological project? And if not, who’s he working for?”
“Haske was in charge of finding muscle for the dig. But he didn’t tell us who’s calling the shots.”
Ernie approached and whispered in her ear. Morningstar nodded. “My friend here says that when he first came in, there were four of you. Where’s the fourth man?”
“Beats me,” said Tig. “Don’t even know his name. He was the guy who made and delivered the survival kits.”
“Are you expecting him back again anytime soon?”
“Dunno. You’d have to ask the guy whose head your friend smashed. Too bad he’s dead then, huh?”
Morningstar inwardly winced. This would have been much easier if they had taken Haske alive, but she could hardly fault Kibi for hurling his barrel.
“Then tell me what you people are digging for out there.”
“Look, sister, the only stuff I’ve seen is what happens in this room. We screen for men who seem like they can swing a pick and haul rock. When we’re satisfied, Haske lets them each take a survival kit, and tells them where and when to meet a guide who will take them out to the dig site. But what they’re looking for, I have no idea. Really, I don’t.”
“And in all this time, have you ever overheard Haske or anyone else talking specifically about how one gets to the dig site?”
Tig shook his head, but only after a telltale pause.
“I’m guessing Haske chose you for your sword arm and not your skill at lying,” she said. “I’ll ask more directly this time. How do you get to the dig site?”
Tig glared at her but didn’t respond.
“Last chance,” said Morningstar. “How do you get to the dig site?”
“Go screw yourself, Ellish witch.”
Morningstar sighed. She had hoped it wouldn’t come to this. The others were bound to object. “Fine,” she said evenly. “I see you’ve opted for the hard way. Tor, Kibi, make sure he doesn’t move his arm.”
“You won’t do it,” Tig spat.
“I will.” And before any of the others could stop her, she lifted her weapon and smashed it down hard on the back of Tig’s right hand. Her captive’s eyes went wide as blood splattered and bones crunched. He opened his mouth to shriek, but Morningstar put her face right up to his. “If you scream, the next one goes in your eye.”
Tig whimpered, tears streamed down his face, and he obviously tried very, very hard not to look at his mangled hand.
“Morningstar!” gasped Ernie. “What have you done?”
“Nothing that Dranko can’t undo,” she snapped, keeping her eyes locked on her subject. “You promised to let me do this, so please, don’t interrupt me.”
“But we don’t know if Dranko—”
“Ernie, shut up!” This was hard enough without getting an earful of Ernie’s misplaced pleas for mercy. “Tig, listen to me. My friend over there is a Deliochan channeler who can fix up your hand as good as new. But he’ll only heal you if I ask him to, and I’ll only ask him to if I hear the truth. Now, how do we get to the dig site?”
Technically she was correct; if Dranko wasn’t lying, he was a channeler, albeit one who might have trouble fulfilling his part of the bargain. Tig glanced down at his crushed hand and bit his lip. He looked like he was about to pass out.
“Dranko,” Morningstar snapped. “Do you have anything in your bag that dulls pain?”
Dranko came to her side. He looked down stoically at Tig’s hand, but if he disapproved, he wasn’t showing it.
“Yeah,” he said. “Hold on.”
Tig started to scream as Dranko dripped some thick purple liquid over his hand, but Grey Wolf pressed the dagger to his throat and he bit his lip instead.
“Better?” she asked.
Tig blinked tears from his eyes, but no longer seemed about to faint. “Promise…promise me that if I tell you, you’ll ask your friend to heal me…please.”
“I promise, but only if I think you’re not lying to me.” She let go of her weapon, leaving it standing at a diagonal, its spiked ball holding it upright by dint of being embedded in both Tig’s hand and the wooden table beneath it. Arms crossed, she waited for Tig to talk.
Tig swallowed and kept his eyes off the table. His voice wavered, no doubt from the extreme pain he was in despite Dranko’s goop, and his gasped sentences came quickly. “If you walk south out of the city…twenty minutes, along the edge of the desert…boulders right up against the edge. They’ve got…pulley system set up. Overnight…head straight west from there to the first island you see. Sleep during…the day. When…sun goes down again…walk northwest…four hours until you see another island. That’s…the one.”
“Thank you,” said Morningstar. “Now, please wait there while I talk with my friends about what we should do next.”
The expressions of her companions showed that she had an uphill climb ahead of her. Aravia was nearly as white as Morningstar herself and was staring at Tig’s ruined hand. Tor was still obediently holding Tig’s arm in place, but he was obviously conflicted and his complexion was a bit green. Kibi had let go when she had slammed down her mace and was looking away from the scene entirely. Ernie was red-faced and furious. Dranko and Grey Wolf were the only ones who weren’t either disapproving or sickened by what she had done. Grey Wolf stood behind her, his body tense, but he nodded when she gestured for a group meeting in the far corner of the room.
They hadn’t made it that far before Ernie exploded. “Morningstar, what in all that’s holy was that? That’s…that was torture! You tortured information out of that man!”
“Do you mean the fellow whose friend would have run you through given another few seconds? That man? I did nothing to him that he wouldn’t have done to us in a heartbeat, and nothing that we wouldn’t be patting ourselves on the back for, had we done it in the middle of the fight.”
“But we’re not in the middle of the fight!” cried Ernie. “He surrendered! You can’t keep smashing someone after he surrenders!”
“The fight is still going on,” she answered coolly. “This is just a different part of it. He only surrendered because he knew we’d have killed him otherwise, and I gave him plenty of opportunity to talk without making me resort to violence. I even warned him of exactly what I would do if he didn’t cooperate.”
“And what now?” asked Ernie. “Dranko, can you heal him?”
“I don’t know,” said Dranko. “I can make sure he doesn’t die of infection, maybe even without chopping off his hand. But if you mean channeling, I…wouldn’t bet on it.”
Morningstar didn’t much care. Men like Tig had, as far as she was concer
ned, renounced any claim to mercy or compassion. She’d just as soon kill the prisoner and be done with it, but she had a good idea what Ernie would say to that.
“Time is important,” she said. “We don’t know who else might be coming here or what happened to the fourth man you saw. There’s no way to hide the bodies or get them out the door without people on the streets watching us. What do we do if someone knocks in the next five minutes?”
“Hide the bodies?” Ernie was incredulous. “That’s…not a thing people do! We just killed two people! We should be notifying the authorities, not figuring out how to…how to get rid of evidence.”
“That wouldn’t be wise, Ernie,” said Grey Wolf, and Morningstar was glad to have someone at least nominally on her side. “What do you suppose a magistrate would say, given the evidence?”
Ernie looked around at the bloody carnage of the room and went pale. “But…but Abernathy…”
Grey Wolf shook his head. “Dammit, Ernie, Abernathy’s name isn’t some kind of password we can use to deflect the law! No one would believe us, or care much if they did. At best we could turn this into a stalemate of accusations, but we’d be passing the time in jail while justice sorted itself out.”
Kibi was looking at everyone but her. “Now that we know where we’re going, shouldn’t we go there? If someone might be comin’ back here, and some other a’ these bad folk figure things out and chase after us, seems we want as big a head start as we can get.”
Morningstar agreed. “Then what should we do with our friend when we leave?”
“We have three choices,” said Aravia. “We can leave him here, alive. We can take him with us. Or we can kill him.”
“That last one is not a choice!” Ernie squeaked.
“I disagree,” said Morningstar. “In fact, it’s the best choice. If we leave him here, he’ll speed up any pursuit from the bad guys. If we take him with us, he could cause all sorts of mischief, possibly slowing us down or sabotaging our mission altogether. Ernie, you have to think practically right now. There’s a—”
“No!” Ernie shouted, and he stomped his foot as he spoke. “I don’t care how…how evil our prisoner is, or that he and his friends tried to kill us, or that he’s part of some old evil cult. We are not going to be the sort of people who accept a man’s surrender and then put him to death. If we do that, we’ll be—”
Morningstar cut him off. “Please. ‘We’ll be no better than they are?’ Is that what you were going to say?”
“Er…yes, something like that,” Ernie stammered.
“Rubbish,” said Morningstar. “The moment they decided to kill us without provocation it became impossible for us to be ‘no better than they are.’ That man relinquished his right to mercy when he lifted his sword against us. It won’t reflect badly upon you to treat him the way he deserves.”
Ernie hesitated, and for just a second Morningstar thought she had beaten down his resistance, but the baker’s son showed annoying stubbornness. “Yes, it will!” he retorted. “How we treat other people is exactly what makes us good or bad people ourselves. Morningstar, believe me when I tell you, I don’t like that man over there, and I think he deserves justice. But we are not the law, and I will not stand by if you or anyone else in this room tries to murder him.”
It was inevitable. While she was gratified that her new teammates treated her as a respected equal, and even more so that they were all decent, competent, and (excepting Dranko) pleasant to be around, they were far too sentimental for their own good. The Ellish religion was, at its heart, devoted to protecting the innocent from predators, and its tenets left little room for interpretation about the complete lack of forgiveness predators were due.
She had the feeling that of all of them, Grey Wolf included, she alone was treating her new responsibilities with the hefty gravitas they deserved. Abernathy had made it clear before they left; the kingdom was under attack, severely, unexpectedly, and from multiple quarters.
“I suppose we’ll need to be a guild council after all,” said Grey Wolf with a sigh. “Let’s vote on it.” Though Morningstar knew how this would go, she was still glad enough not to continue the argument.
“All in favor of killing the prisoner right now?” Grey Wolf asked. Morningstar was the only person to raise her hand; not even Grey Wolf was siding with her. Maybe she was destined to be the outcast yet again.
“All in favor of leaving him here?” Kibi and Aravia raised their hands.
“Then I guess that’s settled,” said Grey Wolf. “He comes with us.”
“There might be another option,” said Dranko. He turned around and called across the room to their whimpering prisoner. “Hey Tig, is there a shrine to Delioch here in Sand’s Edge?”
Tig nodded his head.
Dranko turned back and spoke quietly. “We can take him there. They may have a better channeler, and even if they don’t, they’ll be able to take care of his hand better than I will.”
Morningstar shook her head. “And what if he starts screaming bloody murder the moment we walk out of this building?”
“I don’t think he will,” said Ernie. “Not if he wants to go through the rest of his life with a mangled sword-hand.”
“We need to split up anyway,” said Grey Wolf. “Tor is in no condition to hike across the desert.”
“Neither are you,” said Dranko. “You need at least a day before you do anything strenuous.”
Grey Wolf shook his head. “I’ve had worse,” he grumbled.
“Sure,” said Dranko. “And when you had worse, you spent the day recovering in a tavern with a drink in your hand, not dragging your sorry arse across the Mouth of Nahalm. You should stay here with Tor and the prisoner. And Kibi…sorry, but speed will be more important than strength on this trip.”
Morningstar had to admit that the goblin was making sense. “I’ll go with you,” she said with a sigh. “If we’ll be traveling at night, my darksight will be useful. Aravia and Ernie, you should come too if you’re up for it.”
“If we wait until tonight, I’ll be fine,” said Aravia. “Though I may not be much good for spellcasting until tomorrow morning.”
“I’m good too,” said Ernie. “Kibi took the brunt of the table.”
“What’re you plannin’ to do out there?” asked Kibi.
“Scout the place out,” said Dranko. “Maybe send in someone who’s good at sneaking, to steal whatever it is they’re digging up. That’s assuming we can find someone like that.”
He grinned that ugly tusky grin.
Dranko fished a bag of coins from his pack. “Grey Wolf, take what we have left. The priests will want a donation in return for their attention. Pay them extra if it’ll get them to channel for Tor. Pay a little more, and they may decide to keep their patient an extra day or two. Just leave enough to buy us passage home.”
“Are we all set?” asked Morningstar. She didn’t relish a journey across the desert with Dranko, but it was the best way to salvage the situation. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
THE LAST THING Dranko did before leaving the Black Circle’s recruitment office was to rifle through the pockets of their fallen foes. The bald guy had only a pouch of coins hanging from his belt, but Haske was a different story. While the others looked on, probably shocked by his attention to detail, Dranko discovered three items of particular interest besides the several rings on the dead man’s fingers. One was a folded piece of paper with a crude map of the desert and the closest few wandering islands. Each such island was marked with a wide circle showing its likely positions, and a small darker dot showing a specific location, probably where it was when the map was drawn. Judging from the arrows and small scrawled notes, Tig’s description was spot on.
The second item was the key to the door, which was good because it would buy them some time.
The third item Dranko found hanging from Haske’s neck, tucked beneath his shirt. On a slender metal chain was a small black ring like a spok
e-less wagon wheel, only an inch in diameter. It was of some smooth metal, and though it looked innocuous, Dranko found it oddly discomfiting, as if it were an eye staring at him and wondering what he was up to. If nothing else, the presence of an actual, physical black circle confirmed that they had not stumbled across some other nefarious archeological project by mistake. He stuffed the little talisman into his own pocket with a thought to show it to Abernathy when they next returned to the Greenhouse.
He decided not to try channeling, even though Tor was in rough shape. Whether or not he succeeded, it would take too much out of him before a hike out into the Mouth of Nahalm. In addition to patching up his friends, he treated Tig’s mangled hand as best he could. Morningstar had really done a number on the poor guy, and if there were no channelers at the Shrine of Delioch, he’d be lucky to ever hold a sword again. But those were the breaks. You get into bed with evil cultists, you don’t complain when you get screwed.
The promise of magical healing was enough to convince the thug to remain docile as they casually exited the building. Dranko used the pommel of his dagger to snap Haske’s key off in the lock. Tor, Grey Wolf, and Kibi escorted Tig away, while he and the others walked out of town and along the edge of the Mouth of Nahalm to the Black Circle’s put-in point.
A simple block-and-tackle arrangement had been constructed behind (and in places bolted into) a cluster of large boulders massed near the lip of the desert’s bowl, while the sands whispered twenty feet below. They waited three more hours in the shade of the boulders; it would be sheer idiocy to try walking through the desert in the baking afternoon heat.
Only when the sun was well on its way to the horizon did they get moving again. Each of them had brought one of the survival kits from the recruitment hall, and these included large paddle-like shoes that served the same function as snowshoes. Without them, anyone who tried to set foot in the Mouth of Nahalm would sink swiftly beneath its surface. One by one Dranko lowered the others on a little wooden platform attached to the ropes and pulleys, until only he remained on the higher ground. He locked the rope in place and came down hand over hand.
