The Shattered Mask s-3

by Richard Lee Byers

  "Lindrian told me on his death bed," she replied. ''Now will you stop pretending?"

  "I'm not pretending," he insisted. "Tell me exactly what Lindrian said."

  A bit at a time, she did, and about accosting Audra Sweetdreams and finding the green flask as well, the explanation broken up by fierce passages of arms whenever he permitted her to close the distance. By the time she finished, the light was failing, and the sky a somber blue rapidly darkening to black.

  "Sick men sometimes lose their wits," Thamalon panted. His unarmed hand rose to fumble with the golden clasp of his cloak.

  "Lindrian was rational," Shamur replied, looking for the right moment to attack.

  "Well, then, people can be induced to lie, by magic or otherwise."

  He pulled the cloak from his shoulders and dangled it by its bloodstained collar.

  "Lindrian had been bedridden for months," she said. "How likely is it that someone got to him in the very heart of Argent Hall?"

  "I imagine it could be done."

  Shamur frowned momentarily, for Thamalon was correct. Some intruder could have penetrated Argent Hall. It was conceivable that she herself could have managed a comparable feat in her youth. But even so, she knew very well her nephew hadn't misled her, because she'd verified his assertions in Audra Sweetdreams's shop and Thamalon's own bedchamber.

  "I see you're changing your tactics," she said. "I promise, the cape won't save you. I understand that manner of fighting, too."

  "You've known me for thirty years," he said, circling. He flicked the cloak at her, but she discerned that the action was a harmless display intended to distract her attention from his sword, and she ignored it. "Do you honestly believe I would have murdered a sweet young girl?"

  "I've known you to be hard as diamond to get what you wanted," she said.

  "Well, I never wanted to marry Rosenna Foxmantle," Thamalon said. He flicked the cape again, more forcefully, making the cloth snap like a whip. "The woman was little better than a harlot."

  "And you know about harlots, don't you?" Shamur cut over his blade into the open line, then extended her arm and lunged.

  He stepped back and over, shifting his left foot in front of his right and his cape hand ahead of his sword hand. The heavy wool mantle swept in a circle intended to brush Shamur's thrust to the side.

  It was the defense she'd been hoping for. She let Thamalon feel the cape collide with her weapon, then instantly whipped the blade down and up into line again, freeing it of the folds of cloth that he'd hoped would hamper it. When he stepped through, putting the whole weight of his body behind a low-line stab at her thigh, she met the attack with a thrust in opposition. Her sword pressed his away and cut the inside of his leg just above the knee. It was yet another superficial wound, and she cried out in frustration.

  Their exchange had brought them into close quarters, and he shoved her backward. At once, he tossed the cape, trying to drop it over her head and blind her, but she wasn't so off balance that she couldn't bat it away with her blade.

  "First the lantern, then the cloak," she said. "You just can't hold onto a shield, can you?"

  She advanced and he retreated, unfortunately not limping as far as she could tell. Above the trees, the first stars of the evening had begun to shine.

  "Why would I have proposed to you… your counterpart… whoever if I weren't in love with her?" Thamalon asked. The bloodstain on his lambskin jacket looked black in the gathering gloom. "Not for money, plainly. You Karns didn't have any."

  "For position," Shamur said. "Our marriage was the key to your acceptance by the Old Chauncel."

  To her surprise, Thamalon snorted. "Perhaps you truly aren't the girl I courted so many years ago, for you certainly don't seem to understand the way things work in Selgaunt. Admittedly, our wedding helped reestablish the House of Uskevren, but it wasn't essential. Ultimately, and despite all their flowery paeans to honor and culture, most merchant nobles respect two things: money, and the strength to defend it. Once the Old Chauncel decided I had plenty of both, they would have opened their doors to me eventually."

  She hesitated, for once again, he'd made a seemingly cogent point, though not, of course, sufficient to convince her. "I guess you simply weren't willing to wait."

  She took three leisurely steps to accustom her retreating foe to that pace, then suddenly closed the distance with a fast one. She feinted a head cut, then a side cut, then came back to attack his head in truth. Thamalon blocked her out with a high parry, then spun his long sword in the beginning of a cheek cut. She raised her broadsword to counter, and his blade streaked down at her leg.

  She hopped back and lashed her weapon down in a sweeping low-line parry. The swords rang together, then something jabbed her thigh. But it was only a little sting, and when she glanced down, she saw to her relief that he hadn't wounded her any more grievously than she had thus far managed to hurt him. Her second parry hadn't quite stopped his attack, but it had robbed it of most of its force. She slashed at his sword arm, and he hopped back.

  "Suppose I did try to kill my fiancee," Thamalon said. His back foot slipped in the snow, but he recovered his balance before she could take advantage of it. "Do you honestly think I'd leave the murder weapon in an unlocked box in my bed chamber forever after, where you could so easily discover it? We have vaults in the cellar for hiding our secrets!"

  She scowled. For a second, her weary sword arm quivered, till she willed the tremor away. "Ordinarily, I would agree that such carelessness is unlike you," she admitted, "except for one thing. Until I visited Audra Sweetdreams, I had no way of knowing what the bottle was."

  "Well, do you think I'd leave it where our young children could stumble onto it and take a curious sip?"

  "Oh," she sneered, gliding forward, "I'm to believe you care about the children now."

  He retreated before her, realized he'd almost backed himself up against the trees, and pivoted to alter course. She chose that moment to attack, and pressed him hard until he succeeded in breaking away.

  "Use your head," he rasped, his chest heaving. "If you were a shady dealer in illicit potions, would you dispense them in costly and highly recognizable glassware? For that matter, how likely is it that this Audra of yours gave me such a flask, and here she is still using exactly the same kind three decades later? I tell you, Shamur, someone induced her to lie, then planted the bottle in my room."

  "I see," Shamur said. "Lindrian was a liar, and so is Audra. Everyone lies but you."

  "They did He. Some schemer has perpetrated an elaborate ruse to provoke you into doing precisely what you're doing now."

  "Why, when the world at large has no idea that the genteel Lady Uskevren knows how to kill?"

  "Curse it, woman, whatever you choose to believe, consider this. If you slay me, someone is bound to find out."

  Shamur laughed. "What do I care? After you're dead, I'll ride for Cormyr, and Selgaunt will never see me again.

  There's nothing here I’ll miss." She grimaced. "Well, the children, but I've made my peace with that."

  "All right," he growled, "if you won't see reason, let's finish it. You've made my life a misery for thirty years, and the Stalker take my soul to hunt through the sky if I let you rob me of what's left of it!" He sprang forward, his long sword streaking at her head.

  Retreating, Shamur parried, cut at his chest, and instantly his blade smashed hers aside. She realized then that he hadn't expected his first action to reach its target. He'd been trying to draw a fast, direct stab from her, | which, since he'd been expecting it, he'd easily deflected. | Now his point flashed at her heart.

  Leaping backward, she parried. His point dipped, evading her sweeping blade, and rose to threaten her torso anew. He bellowed a war cry and lunged. She took another retreat, spun her broadsword in a circular parry, and closed him out a split second before his weapon could pierce her breast.

  She cut at his eyes, and the long sword swept up, forming a horizontal bar that hoisted
her blade above his head. Holding her weapon trapped at the juncture of his blade and his guard, he stepped in close and pivoted his point down for a jab at her abdomen. Sucking in her belly, she flung herself around him. Her sword scraped free, and she thrust at the expanse of exposed ribs under his upraised arm. Not one fencer in a hundred could have whirled and parried that attack in time, but he did, then came at her again.

  She almost felt as if she were dueling a new opponent, for his current mode of fighting, a relentless onslaught of strong, lethal attacks, was utterly different from the defensive style of evasions and counterattacks he'd employed before. She thought that if he'd battled this way from the beginning, he might even have defeated her, but he'd waited too long to start. He was tired now, and after a few more fierce exchanges, it seemed to her that his actions were finally starting to slow. Only a bit, but so evenly matched were they that a bit was all she needed.

  She stepped just a hair into the distance, inviting attack, and he obliged her with a feint at her knee, then jabbed a cut at her chest. She stepped forward and swept her blade from right to left. The captain of her father's household guard, the veteran soldier who'd given an importunate, boisterous little girl her first instruction in swordplay, had taught her it was foolish to try such an action. If her opponent thwarted her attempt to defend, her own advance would likely carry her onto his blade. But Shamur didn't fail. She'd sensed exactly where and how Thamalon's true attack would come, and she bashed his sword aside and cut with her own.

  Thanks to her advance, she was dangerously close, and he scrambled backward. Feinting and disengaging repeatedly, she pursued him.

  He kept retreating, the long sword whirling and leaping from side to side and up and down as he searched for her blade. But perhaps she'd unconsciously assimilated his favorite patterns, the ones he fell into when pressed so hard he had not an instant to think, for she anticipated and avoided every parry. Each spring of her long legs brought her point a little closer to his flesh, and she thought that here at last was the phrase that would end with her broadsword buried in his vitals.

  Then the heel of his back foot caught on something hidden beneath a drift of snow. He stumbled, his sword arm flailing too wide to have any hope of deflecting her attack. She truly had him now, and he knew it; she could read the knowledge in his stricken expression. There was no panic there, but frustration and a final flare of defiance.

  Screaming, she cut at his neck.

  And then pulled the broadsword up over his head a split second before it could strike home.

  She hadn't known she was going to spare him, and it took her a moment to understand why. Though his arguments hadn't persuaded her, they'd carried a certain weight, and more telling still had been the fact that up until the very end, when he'd despaired of ever convincing her, he hadn't once attempted a mortal blow.

  He'd always cut and thrust at her limbs, never her torso or head. His reluctance to take her life even to protect his own suggested more powerfully than words that perhaps he wasn't the fiend she'd thought him after all.

  How strange to discover that somewhere down deep in her mind, she'd been working toward such a conclusion, without even knowing it until now.

  Thamalon recovered his balance, came back on guard, but made no threatening actions. "I take it you've had a change of heart," he said.

  "Shut up!" she snarled, for her anger had by no means dissipated. The resentment that had smoldered in her heart for thirty years, and which the tale of the poisoning had fanned into full-blown hatred, still burned inside her. but now it was muddled with doubt and other painful feelings she couldn't even identify.

  "Forgive me," Thamalon said gently, "I wasn't trying to mock you. Why don't we put our swords up?"

  "You might as well," said a mild tenor voice.

  Chapter 8

  Shamur whirled. At the perimeter of the snowy glade, figures wavered into view, evidently emerging from some sort of glamour that had rendered them invisible before. Most were men armed with crossbows and blades of various sorts. Judging from their bearing, they knew how to use such weapons, but she didn't think they were warriors, or at least, not the sort of warriors whom any honorable lord would recruit for his retinue. Their paucity of body armor, tawdry finery, slouching postures, smirks, and sneers all suggested the bully and the bravo. They'd stationed themselves around the edge of the clearing so as to surround the Uskevren, whose final passage of arms had carried them back to the center of the open space.

  Standing safely behind a pair of the ruffians was a man about as tall as Thamalon, his features concealed behind an ambiguously smiling crescent-shaped Man in the Moon mask. His robe and cloak were dark, and he held a black, knobbed staff in his pallid hand. Behind him, indistinct in the failing twilight, its shape subtly altering as it shifted from one foot to the other, was some sort of animate shadow. Shamur inferred that the pair were a wizard and his familiar.

  "I imagine this is the fellow who attempted to gull you," Thamalon said calmly.

  "I deserve most of the credit," said the shadow, and Shamur jumped, because the spirit had spoken in an exact imitation of Lindrian's labored, quavering voice.

  "I did gull her," said the mage, ignoring his spectral attendant, "she just didn't follow through." He turned his head toward Shamur. The gloaming turned the mask's eye holes into pits of shadow. She used his regard as an excuse to take a leery step backward. "It's too bad you didn't opt to murder him in his sleep, Lady Uskevren. Then he wouldn't have had the opportunity to talk you out of it."

  "I must compliment you on your skill at chicanery," Thamalon said. "Ordinarily, Shamur is nobody's fool."

  "I suspect she enjoys thinking the worst of you," the wizard said, "and that helped."

  'Tricking us is one thing," Shamur said. "But how did you and your men get out here in the woods?"

  "We tracked you," the shadow said, "veiled in Master's spells of concealment."

  "You see, my lady," said the wizard, "I made quite extensive plans for your husband's destruction. In addition to manipulating you, I put a watch on Stormweather Towers, and when you two rode out alone, we followed. And thank goodness for that, because this way, everything works out. While you failed to kill Thamalon, you did lure him far away from his retainers, and I daresay that my associates and I won't have a great deal of difficulty disposing of the both of you ourselves."

  "Your bravos could have shot us down as we dueled," Shamur said.

  "You mustn't get your hopes up because of that," the magician said. "I'm afraid that you too must die. It was just that I don't believe in revealing myself to an enemy unnecessarily, even when I hold every advantage. Besides, it would have gratified my sense of irony had Thamalon, who has survived the attentions of so many ill-wishers, perished at the hands of his own wife."

  "Who are you?" Thamalon asked.

  "Lord Uskevren," the wizard said in mock distress, "you wound me. How could you forget-"

  As the mage spoke, Shamur took a second subtle step backward, positioning herself beside the broken lantern. Nimbly as a juggler, she suddenly tossed her broadsword from her right hand to her left and kicked the lamp up into the air. She grabbed it, pivoted, and hurled it at a cross-bowman on the opposite side of the clearing from the mage.

  By the time the missile smashed the bravo in the face, she was sprinting after it, and Thamalon, who had, Mask be thanked, reacted instantly, was pounding along beside her. But the crossbows! She zigzagged to throw off the shooters' aim, then dived to the ground when she heard the ragged, snapping chorus of the weapons discharging their bolts. Unscathed, she leaped back up, and another quarrel, loosed by a bravo who'd taken his time, thrummed past her temple, yanking at strands of her long, pale hair as it passed.

  She glanced at Thamalon and saw that, miraculously, he hadn't been hit, either. Evidently, surprise and the darkness had spoiled their enemies' aim. He gave her a nod, and they raced on.

  Though his brow was gashed and his nose, pulped, t
he rogue Shamur had struck with the lantern was still on his feet, and she was running straight at his leveled crossbow. She watched his trigger finger, praying that despite the darkness, she'd see it move. Then it did twitch, the weapon clacked and twanged, and she threw herself to the side.

  The quarrel grazed her arm. Snarling at the sudden sting, she charged the rogue, her sword extended to complete the ruin of his face.

  Eyes wide with alarm, he dropped the crossbow, scurried backward, and fumbled for the hilt of his falchion. Shamur would have reached him before he ever managed to draw it, except that two more bravos dashed in, one from either side, to intercept her and Thamalon. They too had abandoned their deadly but slow-loading crossbows in favor of their blades.

  Shamur knew without looking that other bullies were also running toward her. If she and Thamalon couldn't break through these first three before the rest arrived, they'd be overwhelmed. She attacked ferociously, and her husband did the same.

  The first opponent to engage her was a wiry, black-bearded man with a gold ring in his lower lip and a short sword in either hand. She feinted a cut at his knee and whirled her broadsword at his head. He parried and held her weapon with the blade in his left hand, then stepped in and stabbed at her belly with the one in his right.

  Striking the flat of the short sword with her unarmed fist, she knocked the attack out of line, observing as she did that her opponent's hands and throat were tattooed with rows of overlapping scales. She chopped his throat with the edge of her stiffened hand, then shoved him away.

  By that time, the man with the bloody face had his falchion in hand. She advanced on him, and he gave ground, evidently well aware that he only had to hold the Uskevren here for a few heartbeats until his comrades could dash up and take them from behind.