by Widowmaker
Her right arm was levelled at the talathen like a weapon, hand open and palm towards them, and green sparks writhed over its skin and spat across the spaces between her fingertips.
“Just one reason,” she said again, pulling the bed-sheets up around her naked shoulders with one hand. The other hand didn’t waver. “One. But make it good.”
The chief tulath hesitated, looked at the still-open door as though measuring his distance to it, glanced back at that ominous crawl of sparks, and then thought better of any such attempt to get away.
“We have your children,” he said simply. “How would you prefer that they die?”
“How would you prefer to die?” countered Bayrd. “And how slowly?” Blood and other fluids streaked the grey gleam of the blade in his hands, and the stench of opened entrails was heavy in the air. It was the Game. It was, it was. But how to counter such a move…? “There’s nowhere for you to go.”
The hard, calculating eyes behind the slits in the grey mask looked him up and down, and twinkled briefly as though a chilly smile had crossed their owner’s face.
“Ah, but yes there is, ar’Talvlyn,” he said, and now that smile was very audible. There was none of the desperation the Bayrd had hoped to hear, no attempt to make a deal with the man carrying the sword. Just an unpleasant assurance that the scales were weighted in his favour.
“We can go out of this fortress, and by a more direct route than we came in. You have no guards left alive on this level of the citadel. Understand me. If we do not walk from this room, then Clan Talvalin dies with you. Because your witch-wife is merely an additional baggage. We took the children first.”
“Bluff,” said Eskra, but even Bayrd could hear the uncertainty in her voice.
“Can you be sure, witch?” said the tulath. “Really sure? How sure can you really be? Consider which of us was fast asleep until a few minutes ago. Consider what I lose if you’re right.” The man leaned casually back against the wall, folded his arms and looked at them both. “Now consider what you lose if you’re wrong. Then say ‘bluff’ again. If you dare.”
Slowly the sparks died from Eskra’s hand, and slowly she lowered it as though returning a weapon to its sheath. Bayrd watched her resolve crumble like a sandbank in a high tide. Though they were better bargaining-counters alive, there was no doubt that Harel and Marla would be killed if it became necessary. Talathen had not earned their reputation through idle threats and unkept promises.
And this one had chosen his argument cunningly.
It was a secret concealed from all but the closest of their confidants – but then one of the well-paid talents of the Shadowthieves was to learn about such things. They were master players in the Game, and an opponent’s death might well be considered a defeat while the use of him still living, bending his will by something like this, was a much more successful move.
After Marla’s long, difficult birth, Master ar’Uwin the physician had warned Eskra not to hope for others. Harel and Marla Talvalin were the only children she and Bayrd had, or would ever have.
But whether this tulath knew it for certain, or was just hazarding his and his comrades’ lives on a common guess, Eskra could never take the risk. She wouldn’t let Bayrd take it either.
And the masked man knew it. He was a bold one, a skilled player. Perhaps even a Master. There were some, still. But part of their Mastery was in keeping their skill concealed.
As this one’s skill had been hidden, until it was needed to save his neck.
He bowed low, secure enough in his safety that he could offer the back of that neck to Bayrd’s blade. “Thank you, lady,” he said, all greasy insincerity now. A thought seemed to strike him as he straightened up, and he chuckled behind his mask. “Our patron thanks you too. That look on your face has confirmed what was no more than rumour.”
So he had been guessing after all. Bayrd’s teeth clenched; the weapon of his children in an enemy’s hands was sharp enough already, but this bastard had just put an extra edge on it.
Truly ruthless men, like the Albans of three or four generations past, would not have let the holding of hostages stand in their way. Children were a renewable resource. But Talvalin children of the blood-clan were not renewable.
Now the Shadowthieves knew it. Soon everyone would know it. The tulath could strike his own deals with as many ‘patrons’ as he chose, and sell the merchandise of information to the highest bidder. And still neither Bayrd nor Eskra dared do anything about it.
“Your choice, ar’Talvlyn.” The man spread his hands expressively. “Do I and my companions leave? Or are you the sort of man who likes to gamble for high stakes?”
“Go,” said Bayrd, his voice little more than a whisper. “Go far, and go fast. Just remember. Soon or late, I’ll find you. Whoever you are, wherever you go. I’ll find you. And then we’ll have a reckoning. Just the four of us. You, and I, and the ladies.”
Bayrd could see the glitter of the man’s eyes as he glanced at Eskra. And then, realizing what was meant, they went wide and stared at Widowmaker. The longsword was still poised in striking stance above Bayrd’s hands like an unhooded hawk, waiting for the last mistake the tulath would ever make. The Shadowthief knew it, and began, perhaps, to suspect what Bayrd Talvalin had known all too clearly this past few minutes.
He was not just holding the sword. He was holding it back.
Whatever little parting witticism the tulath might have ventured died on his masked lips in that instant. For all the strength of their position, he and his henchmen had been lucky. So far. And luck can be stretched only so far. Without another word, without even a derisive salute of farewell, all three of them made for the door.
A slow, sullen rumble passed through the room. Once again the windows rattled, and even the heavy door swung a few inches on its iron hinges. It was a sound like the sonorous reverberation of distant thunder, a herald of the summer storms that could sweep in from the Blue Mountains and be gone again within an hour. But that made no sense.
Bayrd chanced a sideways glance at the window. The moon, low to the horizon now, hung in a cloudless sky. There was no sign of impending rain, much less a storm of the magnitude that rumbling had implied. Even the air lacked the sticky heaviness he had come to know all too well.
Instead it seemed charged with the tingling of discharged energies that usually followed such a storm, and especially after some vast thunderbolt had bridged the distance between Heaven and Earth, and left a glowing clangour like the echoes of light imprinted on the eyes of everyone who saw it. Then Bayrd saw the bedroom door move again.
The first slight movement had been strange enough, though explicable as some freakish effect of the thunder – or maybe an overspill of the leashed magics that still seethed within the room. But the second time was ominous.
Every door in Dunrath-hold was at least eight inches thick, a triple ply of oak braced and studded with iron, each layer of beams set at right angles to the next so they couldn’t be split straight through along their grain. When the clan’s finances allowed, Bayrd intended to sheathe them all in iron; something that even Marc ar’Dru, that notorious spender of other people’s money, had thought both excessive and unnecessary. The doors, he had said, were strong enough as they stood. Certainly they were weighty enough, a weight that sometimes made them difficult to open and shut.
Even more certainly, they didn’t swing to and fro with every passing breeze.
Bayrd watched the trio of talathen as they walked towards it. Towards an open door. Towards their freedom. And all he could think was that he would not have gone near that door right now, not for all the gold of the Three Provinces.
But he watched events develop with interest. It was the cold, malicious interest of a man whose home had been invaded, whose family had been threatened, whose servants had been killed, and who now had a chance to witness the perpetrators of those acts find their own way to Hell. He wasn’t disappointed.
The door swung back from under
the nearest tulath’s hand just as the man reached for its handle. It was almost closed now, and it had moved as smoothly – to Bayrd’s mind – as if the corridor beyond it had just drawn in a long, deep breath.
That Shadowthief spoke aloud for the first time when he swore over his shoulder at Bayrd and Eskra, snarling something in gutter Droselan that might, under the obscenities, have been a warning for them to stop their funny business. He took a step closer, gripping the iron ring of the handle to wrench the door open again. There was no need. Before the man could throw himself aside it flew open of its own accord.
And it movied as hard and fast as a poised hand slapping an unwary fly.
Two hundred pounds of iron and timber smashed ponderously against the wall, and a single half-formed shriek of terror was swallowed up by the massive boom of impact. After that, only liquid sounds remained.
The hinges of the doors of Dunrath-hold were so designed that when fully open, each door lay almost flush to the wall. The space behind them was usually no wider than a finger’s thickness. This door was no exception.
Bayrd had seen plays in which part of the comedy business involved one character or other being caught by an opening door. He wondered now how he could ever have laughed at such a thing. Some of the lamps had been snuffed by the gust of wind as the door slammed open, but those that remained were more than enough. Their light reflected from a great blotch of oozing wetness splattered over the stones of the wall, and Bayrd had no desire to see any more than that. The pictures created by his imagination were already bad enough.
Only two talathen remained. One of them still said nothing, even after what had just happened – Bayrd commended the man’s discipline, if nothing else – but the leader made up in volubility for his companion’s silence.
“You’re insane, ar’Talvlyn!” he screeched. “You think you’re so clever! You think because you’ve killed one of us you can start to make terms? Is that it? Is it? You’re wrong, man! You don’t know how wrong you are! Because you’ve just killed your own children!”
It might have been shock, or even fury, that put such a trembling shrillness in the man’s babbling voice, but Bayrd recognized fear when he heard it. The tulath was terrified. After the Father of Fires alone knew how many of these brutal missions of kidnapping and murder, he realized that he was confronted at last by a man and a woman who cared nothing for his threats.
A woman, anyway. What had moved the door was sorcery or the Art Magic, and knowing the talathen as he did, Bayrd would never have dared. He wondered where Eskra had finally found the courage to call their bluff, and glanced encouragement at her.
Then a queasy chill slid through him like a dagger as he saw the look on her face. What had happened wasn’t her doing. But it had happened all the same. And the consequences would be the same.
Harel and Marla might be dead already…
That too was where the Shadowthief’s terror lay. He wasn’t so much afraid of sudden, immediate extinction in the heat of rage, but of what might follow being taken alive. There was enough human wreckage in this room to show some of the ways in which he could have died already, but those had at least been quick. Without the clan-lord’s infant daughters as a surety, there was nothing to stop the full weight of justice from descending on him. And it would descend slowly, through punishments as prolonged and inventive as hatred could devise.
But Bayrd still didn’t know who could have laid power on the door so that it killed a man—
Until Gemmel ar’Ekren stepped into the room.
His dragon-patterned black staff was held like a spear in both hands, braced at port-arms across his chest, and there was a blue-white flame fluttering like a pennon from the tapering crystal at its point. The scholar inclined his head in a curt bow, deep enough for courtesy, but not so deep that his cold green eyes ever left the masked faces of the two talathen.
“Your daughters are safe, lord,” he said.
Eskra caught her breath in a little gasp that was almost a sob. “And the men sent to take them…?”
Gemmel’s gaze flicked sideways to the door and the crushed and flattened corpse behind it, then back to the surviving Shadowthieves. The black staff swung down and around to level at them. “No longer any threat.”
Bayrd Talvalin had never fainted in his life before, but it was a close-run thing this time. The feeling that swirled up inside him like a cloud of warm, sweet smoke was so intense that for a few seconds, for the duration of four shuddering breaths, the room swam around him. He didn’t sway, didn’t stagger, didn’t even close his eyes; but he wanted to laugh, to sing and caper like a fool, to kiss his wife, to run to his daughters and hug them, to embrace this stranger who had saved his children…
To go off somewhere alone, and cry for sheer relief.
There was a click, and then another gasp, but this time it wasn’t made by Eskra. One of the talathen, the subordinate who had never spoken through all that he had seen, stared at nothing with bulging eyes then sagged forward onto his knees. The grey mask over his mouth went dark as he exhaled blood, and another blotch spread on his chest around the small, bright metal point that bulged from his tunic. Then he collapsed onto his face and didn’t move again.
The weapon that had killed him was still in his leader’s hand. Bayrd recognized it, though he had never expected to see one capable of use. Even before the Albans left, Kalitzak armourers had been trying for years to perfect what they called a telek, supposedly a weapon that could shoot darts without the need of a bowstave to provide its power. But they had never been able to make a spring – of steel, bronze, horn, sinew or whatever – that was both small and still strong enough.
Not until now.
“Damn,” said the last tulath dispassionately. “I had hoped it might go clean through and take one of you as well.” Then he shrugged. “But I couldn’t decide who to aim for anyway.” His hand opened, letting the telek drop with a thud onto the corpse’s back. It was the only movement he could possibly have made that wouldn’t have seen him dead an instant later.
Nobody said a word. Of all the killings tonight, that had been the most callous. The most in keeping with what was said of Shadowthieves. The man stared at them in turn, his eyes bright in the lamplight. Bayrd knew what he could see. His own future, however little was left of it. First there would be the questions: Who had sent him? Why? How much had it cost? All the answers he would refuse to give. Then there would be a rigorous interrogation to squeeze the juice of information from him, like an apple in a cider-press, and finally his useless pulp would be thrown away.
“At least now he won’t be talking out of turn. And neither will I.” Bayrd could hear that sound of a smile in the tulath’s voice again, even though there was little enough for him to smile about. “But if the Father of Fires is good, ar’Talvlyn, then one day I’ll be back. To kill you.”
The Shadowthief turned, took the two long strides and a leap that was all he needed, and flung himself straight out through the window. Out into the darkness that was his only protection now.
And out into two hundred feet of empty air.
Bayrd Talvalin sprang after him, knowing even as he moved that he was half a second too late. There was no sound from outside, no long, trailing scream – not even the laughter that Bayrd was half-expecting. Just a brittle tinkling as the few fragments of glass not carried out by the tulath’s leap fell from the window-frame onto the pinewood floor. It had been as quick as that.
For a few seconds he stood very still, watching, listening, shaking his head, still not certain that it was all over, then slowly lowered Widowmaker’s point to the floor and leaned on the pommel, shivering. That was partly from reaction, but mostly because the night air blowing through the shattered window was cold on his naked skin. Bayrd looked about for his robe, and found it at last. He reached for the garment gratefully – then his nostrils filled with the sheared-copper stench of blood and he felt the fabric’s warmth and sodden weight. He made the mist
ake of looking down, and winced. Hastily dropping the robe, he very carefully and thoroughly wiped his fingers on the towel still wrapped around his waist.
“Talathen are supposed to be able to do almost anything,” said Gemmel behind him. “But I doubt they can fly.”
“No.” Glad of anything else to look at, Bayrd tore his eyes from the half-corpse at his feet and glanced at the broken window; hesitated, then stared harder. “Not fly.”
He wasn’t sure whether to laugh, or curse, or even applaud the tulath’s audacity, because there, sunk into the wood, was a grapnel hook of blackened steel with a thin black rope trailing from it, out and down and away. He stepped forward, moving very carefully, mindful of his bare feet and that a glass splinter is like an enemy. It’s always the one you don’t see that gets you.
There was no weight on the rope. Either the man had somehow fumbled his catch on the way through the window and was lying smashed and dead at the foot of the tower – which Bayrd very much doubted – or he was even now slipping across other roofs, other battlements, other walls, and away to safety.
“Not fly,” he said again. “But I’m starting to think they can do anything else short of magic.” Bayrd looked at Gemmel thoughtfully. “And speaking of the Art…”
“Never mind that for the moment, lord,” said Gemmel, reversing his staff and ramming its spiked pommel-cap into the wooden floor as easily as a knife into a loaf of bread. “Look to your lady.”
Bayrd stared at the black staff and guessed it would sink just as easily into a floor of tile, or stone, or maybe even metal. Then the import of Gemmel’s words sank in as well, and he turned to stare instead at the pallor of his wife’s face and the ribbon of blood trickling from between the fingers clamped around her arm.
