by Lynn Abbey
Meral had been sound asleep when he heard the calls for help. In his line of work it wasn’t an altogether rare occurrence. He was a healer, and as such was prepared to be awakened at all hours of the night, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and ready to go to work. He rose from his pallet, lit a candle, put on his boots, and walked into the middle of the apothecary where the two strangers stood holding a man between them by the arms.
He lit a lantern for better light then walked over to take a good look at the injured … very, very, dead man.
“Can you fix him?” the Irrune woman asked as she and her cohort dropped the man on his face.
Meral grimaced and looked up at them. “Was he a friend, Kadasah?” Meral asked guardedly. Kadasah and her friend weren’t exactly the sort of people a wise man wanted to give bad news to. She was tall even for an Irrune, and she wore the black leather armor and weapons, not to mention the scars of one who had seen many battles. It was hard to tell what race the man was, Ilsigi maybe. Though shorter than his female counterpart, he was no less capable, and the dirk he wore at his belt looked as if it had gotten plenty of use.
“Nah,” she said with a smile. “He’s Dyareelan swine, but I need him alive to prove a point, so … can you fix him, Meral?”
“I’m afraid he’s rather dead,” Meral announced after kneeling and taking a closer look just for their benefit.
“Are you sure?” Kadasah asked in a disappointed voice.
Meral stood up and looked at her with a smile. “The blade seems to have both severed his neck from his backbone and cut his windpipe in two. In my medical opinion, he’s quite dead.” Meral marveled at the fact that there wasn’t a lot of blood; the blow had managed to bring death without hitting any major blood vessels. “On a brighter note, it’s a very clean kill.”
“Could you check him again just to be sure? I sort of need him alive,” she said.
“I told you he was dead, Kadasah. You don’t have to be a healer to see that. You stabbed him through the back of his neck.”
Kadasah gave her companion a dirty look then turned to Meral, smiled helplessly, and said with a shrug, “It’s a very good sword. Are you sure you can’t … I don’t know … make a potion to bring him back?”
“Dead is dead,” Meral answered. “I’m a healer not a wizard.”
She nodded and sighed. “I was afraid of that.”
“He … well, he doesn’t look like one of the Bloody Hand,” Meral said. He’d known Kadasah for a while and it wasn’t the first time she’d come to him when she was in trouble. Kadasah was hotheaded and he wouldn’t half put it past her to kill some poor soul over a dice game then want to take it back.
“Well of course he doesn’t, that’s the whole point,” she explained. “He’s a member of Naimun’s entourage.”
“They’ve infiltrated Arizak’s court?” Meral asked with astonishment and more than a little anxiety.
She seemed to realize then that she might have told him too much. He wondered just what she was up to, and now it looked like she wasn’t likely to tell him. She could be making up this whole story right off the top of her head. It would be just like Kadasah to do that, especially if she’d killed this fellow by accident
“Well, I guess we better take our body and go; sorry to have awoken you, Meral.”
“No problem.” It was, of course, but no sense telling Kadasah that. For one she wouldn’t care and for another it never hurt to have a mercenary of some reputation on your good side.
Kadasah and her friend picked up the body by the arms and started dragging it out.
Meral started to try and stop them, he would have liked to ask them a couple of more questions, but thought better of it. “Sorry I couldn’t help,” he said, watching them as they dragged the body away.
“Maybe some other time,” Kadasah yelled over her shoulder, and then they were gone.
Meral smiled, shook his head, and started back for his bed, but before he made it halfway across the floor a man came screaming into the apothecary brandishing a large dagger. He ran at Meral. Meral stepped aside, and the man ran past him. As he turned to continue his attack Meral pedaled backward, frantically looking for something to use as a weapon to defend himself. He tripped over something of unknown origin and went sprawling. His attacker stood over him ready to pounce, and Meral was sure he was about to breathe his last. He cringed under his arms, and Kadasah seemed to appear from nowhere, sword in hand, screaming a battle cry.
His attacker turned to face the woman and found himself sliced nearly in two for his troubles. She looked down at Meral, smiling helplessly, and shrugged. “Good sword,” she apologized. “And bad, bad, evil cultist.”
“You … you saved my life from that Dyareelan scum,” Meral said as Kadasah reached down with her free hand and helped him to his feet. “If there is ever anything I can do for you …”
“Ah, it wasn’t nothing, but … as long as we’re talking. You got any potions to … Oh, I don’t know, make me run faster and jump higher? And I don’t want the crap this time, Meral, I want the good stuff.”
Meral made up the potion quickly. When he had finished she shoved it into one of three pouches she carried on her belt, then she left, stopping just long enough to reach down and grab the cultist’s body by one foot and drag it off with her.
Meral wanted to ask her why she was taking the body. Ask if they shouldn’t call the authorities about the attack. But the truth was Meral was a healer of moderate skill. His potions many times didn’t work exactly as they were supposed to. He couldn’t afford any more bad press, and dead bodies in a healer’s office were never good for business. Then there was that other thing—it just wasn’t smart to get on Kadasah’s bad side, people who did wound up dead.
“Better to have her as an ally,” Meral mumbled as he put his herbs away.
They didn’t really start talking until they had unloaded the bodies in a remote location next to the Swamp of Night Secrets.
Kadasah started to laugh even as Kaytin stood shaking in his boots and looking all around, expecting some evil haunt to pop out from behind the trees and fog at any moment.
“Meral never even blinked, he just gave me those potions. Hell, I think he’d have given me half the store if I’d just asked. He thought I saved him. It never occurred to him that the bastard had followed us there and that he figured the healer knew too much and was going to kill him just as a forerunner of getting his hands on us.”
“The Bloody Hand are on to you. They know now that you’re the one who’s been depleting their numbers, probably because of all your bragging. They sent an assassin for us, and you somehow find that funny. Well, Kaytin for one is not laughing.”
“Would you calm down and quit being such a chicken shite? They didn’t have time to send someone after us. That guy had to have seen us take ole-what’s-his-face and followed on his own”
“And that’s another thing, Kadasah. I saw no one following us, and neither did you. It is the Chaos Goddess herself who has seen what you are doing. That man,” Kaytin pointed to the larger of the two corpses, “called out to her in his final moments. She heard and sent another of her servants after us.”
“Frogs, Kaytin. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times. There are no gods; there are no goddesses. Just stupid people who want to believe that everything that goes wrong in their lives isn’t their fault.”.
Kaytin covered his ears. “Kaytin does not want to hear. Quit saying such things, and especially don’t say them here and now.” He uncovered his ears and said in a hopeful voice, “Perhaps the Bloody Hand was after the healer and not after us at all.”
“Come on, Kaytin, use that little thing you call a brain. Why would a member of the Bloody Hand be after Meral?”
“Because they want to cause pain and destruction, and someone who heals takes away pain and stops destruction,” Kaytin answered.
“Ah … maybe, but I don’t think so. Doesn’t matter. Meral thinks I saved him
, and I’ll be able to go get any kind of potion I want, without paying for quite awhile.” Kadasah busied herself stripping the corpses of anything that might identify them—and anything of value. “I ruined this robe and the shirt he was wearing under it,” she muttered.
“If Dyareela is on to you, ruined clothing will be the least of your worries and you might need the healer’s services to mend your wounds.”
“I’ve blown farts more powerful than this so-called goddess.”
“Kadasah, do not taunt the goddess,” Kaytin said in a hiss.
She frowned then, and for a second Kaytin thought that perhaps she understood the true seriousness of their situation, but then she ruined the moment by saying, “This one’s covered with tattoos and scars, but Naimun’s boy doesn’t have a single distinguishing mark on his body. Frogs, how can I prove I got two? If these guys aren’t going to mark themselves, it’s going to make it damn hard for me to collect my reward.”
Surprisingly enough, Kadasah never even tried to cheat her patron. Some sort of honor thing Kaytin didn’t really understand, considering all the swindling and stealing she normally did.
“Why don’t you take two tattoos from the guy who has so many? It wouldn’t even be lying, you did kill two of them.”
Kadasah nodded and started to do the deed. She slipped the pieces of skin into the pouch she used specifically for that purpose, then she slashed the faces of her victims until they were unrecognizable and tossed the bodies into the swamp. She cleaned up in the muddy water and then they headed back to town.
Kaytin was only too glad to go. Dumping bodies was never one of his favorite things, but the Swamp of Night Secrets gave him goose bumps up and down his spine on the best of days.
There were evil things there; he knew it. Kadasah didn’t believe in such things. Kadasah believed in nothing except Kadasah. But despite what she might think, just because she didn’t believe in something didn’t mean it didn’t exist.
Kadasah sent Kaytin ahead to the Vulgar Unicorn as she went to leave the proof of her kill in her secret hiding place for her patron to find. She didn’t trust Kaytin to know where that was, and he guessed that said about everything you needed to know about their “relationship.”
Kaytin sulked up to the bar and ordered a tankard of Talulas Thunder ale. It was getting on toward the middle of the late watch, and the bar was sparsely populated.
“You look more than a little shaken this evening, Kaytin,” Pegrin the Ugly said with real concern.
“Were you ever in love, Pegrin?”
He laughed. “Oh, aye, many times,” he looked around. “So … where is the Irrune wench?”
“On business. She’ll be back shortly to drink too much and lie even more. We may even get back home and into bed before daybreak.”
“Doesn’t sound to me like love is your problem, sounds more like too much of each other.”
Kaytin’s head shot up and he nodded. “Exactly! The woman … she uses Kaytin till there is nothing left.”
Pegrin laughed loudly and said over his shoulder as he went to wait on another customer, “You know, in all my years behind the bar I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a man complain about that particular problem.”
Kaytin sipped at his ale. “All of Sanctuary is laughing at Kaytin’s pain,” he mumbled into his drink.
Kadasah awoke early the next afternoon lying crosswise across her “bed” with her head resting on Kaytin’s bare stomach and her feet laying out on the dirt outside the door. Her head was pounding, and her tongue felt hugely swollen. Damn! She hoped she’d had a good time.
She sat up and wiped the dirt off her feet. It was drizzling, apparently, because her feet were wet, or maybe they’d just had a very thick dew. No, it was raining, she could see the water dripping from a hole in the roof onto Kaytin’s head.
“Hey, Kaytin,” she said softly, as much for her head as his.
He covered his face with his arms. “No … not again, not so soon, I can’t, please, I beg you.”
“Whatever are you going on about? I was just going to tell you to move out of the drip.”
Kaytin moved his arms, looked up, and a drop of water landed in his eye. He got quickly to his feet and showed that he was at least a little hungover when he staggered and held his head.
“That’s it! I’ve had it. Do you hear me? This is the last straw. Would it be too damn much to ask for a new oilcloth at least, maybe a real door? You’re about to get paid, couldn’t we have a few comforts for the house? Do you really expect me to just continue to live here in this shack with you without even the simplest of conveniences? Does Kaytin mean anything to you at all, or am I just a convenient frog, a stooge to help you with your dirty work, a lackey to hold your horse and your place at the bar?”
“All right already,” Kadasah said, holding her hands over her ears to hold out his yelling. “You can have a new roof, and a new door.”
As soon as the rain let up they rode into town and Kadasah sent him to the changing house to swap the sword, dagger, boots, and clothes she’d taken from the two guys she’d killed the night before for the things he wanted.
He should have known it was too much to hope for that she might just hand him money and say, Go buy what you need.
Bezul looked at the still-wet clothing suspiciously, and Kaytin, who had stopped to wash the blood from the items of clothing, said quickly, “They got wet in the rain.”
“Uh-huh,” Bezul said skeptically. “And I suppose your girlfriend takes in laundry for a living.”
Kaytin smiled helplessly, and assured Bezul. “She didn’t steal them.”
Bezul shook his head, a smile on his face. “Get what you need.”
Kaytin found what he needed, the whole time wondering why she couldn’t just give him the money and come in and exchange things like the clothing and weapons of men she had killed herself. By the time he left the changing house his hands were shaking, and he didn’t feel guilty at all about keeping the few coins Bezul gave him in the trade.
The skies were gray and Kaytin was sure he could smell a storm coming. They worked through the rest of the day together to repair the door and lay the new oilcloth over the old one, tacking it down on the edges to what was left of the rafters.
When they had finished Kaytin was surprised at how much better he felt about everything. There was a certain security in knowing he had someplace to go where the wind couldn’t reach him and the rain couldn’t fall on him.
Besides, he had complained and she had actually cared enough to do something about it, which had to mean something.
They sat around the fire that evening chewing on some burnt animal or another, and Kaytin finally felt like he was home.
“I wish there was some way I could get Arizak and the others to listen to me,” Kadasah said.
“Just tell them about the guy you killed. That he came out of the tunnels, that he sang praises to the lady of death,” Kaytin said. “Why would you lie?”
“I’m sure they could come up with lots of reasons. They won’t believe me any more now than they did before. I don’t have any proof,” Kadasah said angrily, throwing what was left of her portion into the fire, not that it could burn any more than it already had. “More likely than not they’d string me up for confessing to the murder of ole-what’s -his-name.”
“You could tell them it was an accident.”
“Oh, yes, Kaytin, that will work. I accidentally stabbed him in the back of the neck, and then I accidentally stripped him, disfigured him, threw him in the swamp, and sold his stuff to fix my roof.”
“You had plenty of money to fix the roof,” Kaytin mumbled. Then he took a deep breath and said, “I heard that the Dragon and some of his people have left Sanctuary and gone off to the wilds to ride horses and play with sheep. And they say that Arizak’s taking so many drugs for the pain in his foot that he’s somewhat addled …”
“You apparently listen for the both of us,” Kadasah said with a smile. �
�But I fail to see of what use that information is to me.”
“Kaytin was just thinking that with everyone else so preoccupied, perhaps now would be a good time to approach Naimun, to tell him what you have learned Without of course telling him that you killed his friend. You could just say that you saw him go down into what you know is an entrance to the Dyareelan tunnels.”
“I’m not sure they even believe that anyone still lives in the tunnels. They refused to even go with me to look, remember? Perhaps I should just try talking to my father.”
“Your father … I thought you said that he was dead.”
“Well almost, he’s old and he lives in the palace; that’s nearly the same thing.”
During the night the storm blew in fast and furious. It was so bad that Kadasah found herself glad that Kaytin had whined and that she had caved in to him.
He was sound asleep; she didn’t know how. The wind and thunder were loud enough that she wondered if there might be a hurricane in the midst of the storm.
Just before the storm had started in earnest she had gone out to check Vagrant and Kaytin’s mule and found them right where she had thought they would be—huddled against a wall in a slightly larger, but less sturdy, stone outbuilding. Kadasah had stacked full logs and tree limbs over the top of it to make a shelter for Vagrant. The first time Kaytin had seen it he had made the observation that the horse lived better than she did.
Vagrant never went into the shelter unless the weather was incredibly horrid so Kadasah knew right then that they were in for a hell of a storm. She had stroked his nose, assured him that all would be well, and started for the house stopping only a second to say a kind word to the mule.
She’d just reached their newly rebuilt door as the bottom fell oat of the sky and the rain started to come down in buckets. In the red light that illuminated the small room she saw Kaytin look up at her with a smug smile.
She smiled right back. “Good idea I had to fix the door and the roof.”
