Without warning, she brought her blade up, but he countered easily, giving her a wolfish grin over their crossed blades. He shoved unexpectedly, and she stumbled back.
She checked and swung around, narrowly dodging a vicious thrust. Her style relied on skill rather than brute strength, and with the element of surprise lost, she circled, watching, waiting, assessing. Toe to toe, she would be overmatched every time.
Aharris circled with her, carefully balanced on his feet, the sword poised in his big hands. His eyes scrutinised her as carefully as she did him, searching out weaknesses.
Her sword flickered out, probing. He deflected easily, and they dropped back into circling.
Anticipation ran through the crowd like wildfire, turning to restless mutters. Ellaeva narrowed her focus to Aharris, watching his body for any tell-tale tensing of muscles. Without his hauberk and plate, he was wolfhound lean, and he moved with the sure confidence of a cat, his blue eyes raking her in the same way she studied him. Though her robes would make her hard to read, she kept her shoulders relaxed.
A heated flurry of blows ended in another stalemate, and they retreated into the circle pattern. She balanced on the balls of her feet as she moved. Though the vicious wind still whirled through the courtyard, sweat began to trickle down her back and between her breasts under her black robes. The wind turned it to ice against her skin. Perspiration gleamed on Aharris’s brow, and darkened his red hair almost to black.
A split-second opening, and she probed—too slow. Their wooden blades clacked together as he parried neatly. She attacked with renewed vigour, but his defences were too tight, and she fell back, her breath harsh in her ears. The stink of sweat hung on the air now. Aharris’s chest rose and fell faster.
A few disgruntled mutters spread through the crowd. Those more knowledgeable shushed the critics, spell-bound by the display.
Aharris lunged. She sidestepped, smacking his sword aside with the flat of the blade. He quick-stepped away as she brought her own sword around in a tight arc, nearly raking his ribs with the tip. When she pressed the attack, he stepped in close, locking the blades hilt to hilt. He held the position, muscles bulging with the strain as she pressed against him. He might as well have been an immovable rock.
She glared, straining against his hold and trying to disentangle her blade, to no avail. He was too strong for her to overcome with brute force, but he didn’t press the advantage; he exerted just enough strength to hold their blades in place.
“You’re good.” Admiration tinged his voice.
She bared her teeth in a snarl and shoved against him. His arms moved a bare inch, if that, and he chuckled.
His mirth fanned the flames of her fury. Without thinking twice, she brought her knee up into his groin. Gasping, he doubled over and released the practice sword. She shook it free of her own blade and placed the point of her sword to his neck.
“All’s fair in love and war,” she said.
An ugly murmur ran around the watchers, and she glanced over. The guards looked at her with varying degrees of disapproval. She’d made no friends.
Should have let him win.
“Should’ve known... not to trust you,” he gasped. Even though his breath still wheezed in and out of him, a smile touched his lips. “No honour on the battlefield.”
He seemed genuine, and any sense of anger at her faded. She dropped the point of her sword away from his throat, and he straightened out enough to lean against his bent knees. Now that the session was over, she found herself inexplicably uncomfortable in his presence. But why? It was the under-handed knee to the groin. She shouldn’t have allowed her irritation to get the better of her. Even if he was laughing at me. Though there’d been no malice in him. No, on reflection, he’d been more appreciative of a worthy foe. Most likely the soldiers here offered him no real challenge.
“Did you learn anything about the sabotage?” Since he’d stopped talking to her, she hadn’t heard any news about the investigation.
He grabbed the practice sword from the ground and used it to lever himself straight, grimacing. “Nothing helpful, and nothing good. Apart from the locking mechanism in the guardhouse, we also found the gatehouse gears damaged. All that’s been repaired, but then after we cranked the portcullis up that last time, we discovered we can’t lower it again. We lack the parts to fix that.”
Bad news indeed. With the portcullis jammed open, one of the key defences on the barbican was weakened. “No clue who was responsible?”
“Galdron questioned the guards, but no one remembered seeing anyone untoward. Galdron himself checked the guardhouses at the shift change two hours after midnight, to be sure all was in order. The only others seen were where they were supposed to be—the guards on shift, and the serving women bringing the evening meal, but they never went within spitting distance of the mechanisms in either guardhouse or gatehouse. How much power does this necromancer have? Could he have been there and no one noticed—or remembered?”
“It’s, uh, possible.” Movement across the courtyard caught her eye.
“Sir!” A running soldier pulled up before them, out of breath with exertion. “Sir! There’s illness in the castle.”
Ellaeva froze. In a castle under siege, where cramped quarters and poor hygiene spread disease like wildfire, few things frightened like illness.
Aharris turned to face the soldier. “What kind?”
“Vomiting. The injured are the sickest, but others are being brought to the banqueting hall. They’re unable to keep even water down. Lady Leinahre is worried they’ll die if she can’t get them to drink.”
Lady Leinahre? Although she was minor nobility, her family probably comparable to that of Janun’s, this title was new. Was it a sign the soldiers were struggling to understand her exact rank, now that she was filling in for a surgeon?
“Where do the garderobes empty to?” she asked. Human waste was often a source of illness. Some castles emptied the effluent straight into the moat, occasionally contaminating their own water supply.
But Aharris shook his head. “Into great pits another level below the catacombs. The cisterns are cleaned out from time to time, but they’re well contained and an unlikely source of illness.”
Around them, the other soldiers melted away as word spread.
“Then the food supplies?” she asked. The next worst fear in a castle under siege was spoiled meat and rationing.
“They’ll need to be checked.” He dusted himself off and passed his practice blade to a soldier, who handed him the clan sword. “Apart from the pantry, there’s cool storage on the catacombs level.”
“I’ll check the sick.”
“Good idea. I hear all Ahura’s initiates demonstrate some ability with minor illness?”
“Some ability to detect them. My powers are different. The goddess grants a Battle Priestess one specific power for each sense, and one of those is the ability to smell illness. Treating it, however, may be difficult. I have some abilities, but I can’t promise a blanket cure.”
“One power for each sense,” he said. “So, for touch, that’s how you kill on contact?”
She’d known he’d go there. “No. That’s hearing. If I can hear the heartbeat of another creature, I can stop it—with Ahura’s blessing.”
She kept her words as short as her tone, and strode off before he asked any more questions. He already knew about her ability to see true and to shut off her sense of pain, and now he knew two more. He would ask about the fifth power sooner or later. When she glanced back, he turned and hurried towards the well room and the pantry.
At the barracks, next to her sword, rested his hauberk and plate in a pile. She shook her head and picked up her sword. Everard would not be happy.
Deliberately, she turned and kept going towards the western spiral staircase that led to the withdrawing room via the library. On the table in the withdrawing room, the map was still spread out and marked with the troop positions they knew, but she didn’t slow t
o look as she passed through, headed for the opposite door to the banqueting hall.
The next room sobered her. All the tables and chairs were arrayed along the walls to make room, and pallets waited on the floor in readiness for wounded soldiers. She’d lost count already of how many battles she’d fought in the five years since her initiation rituals, but she remembered many other sickrooms, both from battles and from wars, where men and women cried and moaned in pain, or lay still like the dead they would soon be. The memories left her sick to the stomach, but countless more days like this stretched ahead of her—and somewhere in the future lay her own death in battle. No Battle Priestess had yet died old in bed.
Drawing her shoulders back, she strode deeper into the room. Five people were crouched miserably over bowls and buckets, and another four men and one woman, all with bandaged limbs or heads, watched warily from the far side of the hall. The sharp reek of bile obscured any other scent.
Near the tower stair, a woman turned away from a table, and started when her gaze crossed Ellaeva.
“What are you doing here?” Hostility edged Leinahre’s voice. Her black hair was pulled back neatly into a tight bun. “Does Lyram know you’re in here?”
The familiarity with which she spoke of Aharris firmed Ellaeva’s certainty that she hoped to catch his eye—though she addressed him formally when he was present, the usage of his first name now seemed designed to remind Ellaeva she was an outsider. Well, Leinahre wouldn’t be the first woman who sought to improve her station after a lord was widowed, but didn’t she realise how inappropriate a time this was? Though she was of an age with Leinahre, she felt the gulf of experience between them. The wisdom she’d gained from her service to the goddess left her older than her years.
“There is illness in the castle. I came to examine the sick.”
“I don’t want your help.” Leinahre put her hands on her hips, and tossed her head. Her blue eyes, usually wide and disarming whenever Aharris was around, had turned flint hard.
Ellaeva pressed her lips together in a thin smile. “No, but you need it.”
Leaving Leinahre with her mouth hanging open, she knelt next to the closest victim, a woman hunched over a bowl as cramps wracked her body.
There was no chance she’d catch the illness—service to Ahura carried some benefits—but as she reached for the woman, she paused, sensing an elusive miasma: a subtle hint of an unwholesome taste on the tongue, a stink too diffuse to identify. She rolled the flavour around in her mouth, grimacing. Putrefaction? With a muttered prayer to Ahura to better engage her power, she sniffed delicately.
Though she’d expected something, she had not anticipated the putrid stink that assailed her nostrils, as though the room was wreathed in the fumes. She gasped and surged to her feet, backing away so fast she kicked over a pitcher of water.
“You clumsy fool!” Leinahre snatched up cloths and pushed past to clean up the mess, but Ellaeva grabbed her by the shoulder and hauled her back bodily.
“When did you last touch them?” Ellaeva asked.
Leinahre hesitated, and indicated a man with a fresh bandage wound around his head. “That one was the last. Not in the last hour, though, I don’t think. What’s going on?”
Ellaeva dragged Leinahre away from the sick, and kept her voice low. “They’ve been touched by decay. Death comes for them, and nothing you nor I can do will save them. If you touch them, nothing will save you either. Stay here, and allow no one near them!”
Leinahre’s dark-blue eyes widened in fear, but Ellaeva had no time to reassure her. Spinning, her robes swirling around her ankles and her sword banging against her knee, she raced for the grand stair. If she didn’t find the source, many more would die. There had been servants as well as soldiers leaning over those buckets, so the source was most likely in the food or the water.
Her feet beat a rapid tattoo down the broad, sweeping stairs. At the bottom, she ducked under the staircase into the servant’s quarters and hurried through into the sweltering heat of the kitchen, past the cook-fires roaring in huge hearths. Sweat sprang out on her skin and almost instantly evaporated in the heat. Women in tartan kirtles and food-spattered aprons turned to stare as she dashed through.
Then she was past, and into the relatively cool shadows of hall leading to the well room. No candles burned here, and the space was only dimly lit by two windows to the courtyard.
Ahead, in the well room, Aharris leaned over the lip of the well, sniffing at the contents of the bucket. Galdron stood beside him, beads of sweat running down his face.
Galdron clapped a hand to his blade as she hurried out of the shadows, then let it fall, looking sheepish. Aharris looked up at his captain’s sudden movement.
“Sabotage,” she gasped. “Something’s contaminated with the corruption of Rahmyr.”
Galdron gasped at the name of the goddess of decay, but no one looked at him.
“The sick cannot be saved,” she said, “and neither can anyone else who touches them or the source of the corruption.”
Aharris blanched. “The well?”
She leaned over the bucket and drew in a deep breath. “It’s clean. The food stores, maybe?”
She stepped into the cool darkness of the pantry. Loaves of bread from today’s baking sat on shelves near the jars of preserves and pickles. Onions hung from the ceiling. Sacks of meal and grain lined one wall. No scent of putrefaction touched her nose. She blinked, and her vision separated into two and then slid together again, setting her senses jangling. The human body wasn’t made to deal with the divine. If she kept operating at this level, channelling the goddess through her body, she’d damage her mind. Permanently.
“Nothing here,” she said. “The cold store? Or the bulk food stores below?”
Aharris gestured towards the spiral stairs near the door to the courtyard. Torches lit the stairwell leading down, and he took one as they went deeper. Galdron followed on his heels, gnawing hard on his lower lip and mopping the sweat from his brow. Fresh moisture sprang out almost as soon as his hand passed. Ellaeva brought up the rear, the smoke from the torch stinging her eyes.
Though the stairs continued deeper into the dark earth, Aharris left the stairwell at the first exit.
“This is the highest level of the catacombs,” he said. “We use these natural caverns as storage space. The cloister is on this level too. Below this level are the cisterns and large sections of unmapped tunnels.”
The walls were rough, unformed rock and hard packed earth, and the floor was uneven and littered with dust and grit. Small stones rattled away in their passing. Only the main tunnel was lit.
Aharris struck out down another, unlit branch, past intersections and a few heavy, oaken doors. The oppressive dark closed in around them, pushed back only by the small circle of light created by the flickering torch. The sound of their footfalls broke the still silence of the tunnels. The atmosphere was that of some great, giant beast on the breathless verge of waking.
“Cool storage,” Aharris announced, gesturing into a small dead-end cave where the tunnel forked. “Wheels of cheese, meat, and milk when we have it.”
She entered the cool cavern. Haunches of beef, whole lambs, and dressed pigs hung from the ceiling. Legs of salted ham and whole chickens hung deeper in the cave. Enough meat, with much of it smoked and dried, to keep the castle in food for months.
The stink of Rahmyr assailed her so powerfully, she doubled over and vomited on the stone floor. Bile burned her throat.
Aharris caught her by the shoulders as her stomach heaved again, and again, her abused muscles screaming in protest, until she’d nothing left to vomit.
She straightened, wiping her mouth with her sleeve. The horrible taste lingered on her tongue.
Aharris’s face tensed, his jaw clenching hard. “How much of it?”
She swallowed the bile lingering at the back of her throat with a grimace. “All of it.”
It was a subdued group that headed back out of the tun
nels, Ellaeva taking the lead, with Galdron grey-faced between her and Lyram. Another now knew of the Rahmyrrim, and his captain didn’t look to be taking the news well. No one spoke. The loss of the better part of the castle’s stores weighed too heavily for mere conversation.
Lyram pounded his fist against the wall as he passed, sending a small shower of dirt falling from the ceiling. “I want this bastard found!”
Ellaeva stopped and turned back, forcing Galdron to stop. “How do you propose to do that? You’ve already searched the castle top to toe more than once and found nothing. We couldn’t even find him when we knew where he was inside a twelve-hour window! The reality is we don’t even know what we are looking for. It could be anyone.”
“It must be a castle resident. Someone recently come. If it were anyone who came with me, I’d be dead by now.” Black rage had his chest heaving, and he fumbled the whisky flask from his belt in lieu of pounding the wall again. The hand already smarted from its impact with the unrelenting dirt and rock.
“They might not want you dead. Maybe they want you discredited, exiled, disinherited, arrested, married.... Although you’ve done a good job on some of those fronts yourself!”
That pulled him up short. “Marriage?”
“Any major event could change the course of your life. A new marriage is such an event.”
“And would require my wife to be out of the way.”
Their gazes locked. Could this really stretch back that far? Ahura, it would mean someone had been running a long plan.
It would also mean the Rahmyrrim was someone he brought with him from the capital. Someone close to him. That... that didn’t bear thinking on. He unscrewed the cap of the flask with shaking hands and took a swig, grimacing as it burned down his throat. The whisky seemed too sweet again.
“I’ll—” Galdron swallowed. “I’ll go check the kitchens for meat.”
“Don’t touch it!” Ellaeva called after him.
“And not a word!” Lyram said.
Galdron nodded and disappeared up the hallway. Lyram sighed and drew another draught of liquor. Maybe Everard could explain to the captain. He had no time to soften the blow right now.
In the Company of the Dead (The Sundered Oath Book 1) Page 11
