by Joseph Lallo
“You killed a dozen or more humans in a single day, mally. I'd be in the right if I buried this shovel in your chest.”
“It doesn't change anything.”
He was quiet for a long time. Finally, as though it caused him physical pain to utter the words, he answered. “I'll do it.”
The Shadow didn't linger. Without another word, he slipped on his mask, pulled up his hood, and swept off into the night.
#
Menri did not delay. The following morning, he set off for a marketplace at a nearby crossroads, and from there learned of the location of a plantation owner on the other side of the territory looking for a buyer for some of the slaves he'd picked up to get through a particularly rough harvest. No one thought twice about a land owner buying a few slaves from another. He made some excuses about why he'd rather keep the sales from the local lord. He must have been a more skillful negotiator than Gurruk. Three more such deals netted him fifteen men and five women, all double and triple- stripe slaves. They were freed, healed of their labels, provided with the remainder of the gold, and sent on their way.
The Shadow watched it all, doing his best to memorize faces, to burn the scents into his mind. He would need them. There was no doubt about it. As he watched men and women who days before had been resigned to a life of servitude walk out into lives of their own choosing, there was no longer any doubt in his mind. What he had done was worth it. Anything would be worth it. So he would need them all, because this was just the beginning.
Chapter 22
Duule grumbled miserably. After Teht had violated his last attempt at a secure meeting place, he'd left nothing to chance. His new headquarters was the basement of a blacksmith's shop. It was sweltering, cramped, and the air was thick with the choking smell of burning wood. It was also a veritable vault: completely underground with sturdy stone walls and a single entrance. The fact that a blacksmith's shop wouldn't look out of place with a few strong men with intimidating weapons didn't hurt either.
“He's here,” came the muffled voice of the thug Duule had guarding the door at the top of the stairs.
“Well, send him down, idiot!” Duule snapped.
The door opened and down the stairs thumped an aging but threatening man. He was short and his advancing years had left him soft around the middle, but something in his posture was unmistakably intimidating. Red mud was caked into a sun-blocking layer on his skin. His clothes were ancient and handmade, stitched together from hides and baring his scar-notched arms. An irregularly-trimmed beard and wild thatch of hair was gray with the slightest hint of black. He gnawed a stem of sugar-stalk, absentmindedly scratching at the four deep scars dominating his face. Dust flaked away as he did so. When he reached the only vacant chair, he sat heavily, sending a cascade of reddish earth to the ground beside him.
“You are Dihsaad?” asked Duule, making no attempt to hide his disgust at the man he'd been forced to deal with.
His visitor nodded slowly, spitting a bit of sugary pulp to the ground.
“My men tell me that you are malthrope hunter.”
“I have been,” he stated.
“Have been? Am I to believe that you are not a hunter anymore?” Duule's expression could have shattered stone, and in his eyes, one could see his mind at work crafting a suitable punishment for those responsible for this waste of time.
“Not a hunter. I track, mostly. Until recently it was slaves. Tracking a malthrope is a bit harder. Killing is a young man's game though.”
Duule calmed somewhat. “Fine. That's fine. I've got no shortage of men willing to handle that part of it. I trust your services are available for hire?”
“For the right price, my services are always for hire.”
“Good, good. I assume you're aware of the rash of mally attacks up and down eastern Tressor.”
He grunted. “Attacks? Thought it was just sightings. Anyway, yes, I'm aware. Strange. Mallies don't all do things at once. It makes me think it's all the same one, except mallies like to keep to familiar ground, mostly. Maybe you see a string of sightings in one direction, but not the other, not so soon after.”
“Yes, well,” Duule began, a hesitation in his voice suggesting that he was reluctant to say what came next. “I've had some problems with a bounty hunter who wears a mask. He has been unwilling to remove it and . . .” He chuckled. “It has been suggested that the mally and the hunter might be one and the same.”
The unscarred side of Dihsaad's lips peeled back in a grin, revealing gleaming white teeth that seemed out of place amid his otherwise grimy features.
Duule sneered. “Laughable I know, but—”
“No. Just means it's a feisty one. A feisty one gave me this,” he said, running his fingers across the scars.
“You mean to tell me that a malthrope could be smart enough to find a mask and deal with humans without being detected.”
Dihsaad's eyes drifted. “I didn't used to think so, but something happened a little while back.” He rubbed a fresher scar on his other cheek. “Malthropes . . . you don't really know them until you know them. If you think they're mindless, soulless, bloodthirsty animals? You're right. If you think they're vile, deceitful, manipulating fiends? You're right about that, too. They are those things and plenty others. I guess it just depends on which one you're taking about.”
“How could anything be all of those things?”
“Look in a mirror and you answer me,” he said with a shrug.
Duule turned the words over in his mind for a moment before abandoning them as incompatible with is favored way of thinking. “If you can track this creature down, you can name your price, but only on one condition. I need to hear its voice.”
“You want it alive?”
“No. I want it dead, and I want it to suffer. But you only get the full price on this thing's head if I hear it with my own ears first. If it and the hunter really are the same, then this thing had the gall to turn me in. I heard it speak, and I want to be sure the beast I kill is the same one that dared cross me. I'll pay any price to make an example of someone who crosses me, but I am not in the habit of paying a fortune for the extermination of a simple pest.”
Dihsaad pulled the stalk from his mouth, spat, and nodded. The men stood and slapped the shoulder of the other.
“Start immediately. My men will be in touch.”
Dihsaad made his way up the stairs and out of the basement, leaving Duule to brush away the filthy red hand print on his shoulder and quietly curse the man or beast responsible for the humiliations he'd been forced to endure.
#
Once assigned one of Duule's more reliable hired blades, Dihsaad went to work. Tracking something like this one, a target who moved over half the kingdom, was a daunting task. Dihsaad was a meticulous and experienced tracker, though, and Duule had eyes in every corner of Tressor. The tracker gathered rumors, sifted through them, and selected a place to start. It was a stretch of shrubs and tall grass, some distance from a road near a town on toward the east coast.
“You sure we should be here? No one said they saw the thing here,” said the muscle that Duule had assigned.
Though the man in question was named Munn, he could just as well have been any of the legion of stout strongmen in Duule's employ. His scalp and face were both poorly shaved, with a filthy rag tied tightly to his head to keep the sun off and a heap of knobby crocodile-hide armor draped across his hulking body. He carried a curiously shaped blade as well. It was the length of a longsword, but with a broad, single-edged blade that made it resemble an oversized cleaver.
“A mally that's smart enough to survive more than a few years doesn't spend much time in a place where people might see it,” Dihsaad said. “Around the same time, people claim to have seen one in each of the towns surrounding. This is the best cover near to them all. It spent time here, if anywhere.”
While his dimwitted assistant watched with an equally vacant mind and expression, Dihsaad crouched stiffly and began to crawl across the ground,
sweeping his eyes and sifting the sandy earth with his fingers. This was the third likely hiding place that they'd searched. The last two hadn't had a scrap of evidence to suggest that a malthrope had even passed through. This one felt different, though. The usual signs were still absent, but there was the sense that they had been removed, covered up. It was difficult to be sure. Here was a patch of dirt a bit too smooth, as though a footprint had been swept away. There was a pile of stones that seemed to have been arranged. He was about to give his knees a much needed rest when his fingers came upon something in the dirt. He dug down a bit more and revealed . . . a bone.
“What's that?” Munn asked.
“A rib. Chewed by teeth a good deal bigger than anything around here ought to have. Broken for the marrow. Buried. Yes . . . this is one of the clever ones.”
#
As the Red Shadow continued in his task, clearing Maribelle's “black list” and quickly becoming her most valued asset, Dihsaad continued his search. He knew from experience that a malthrope was not like a fugitive or slave. One did not capture a malthrope by chasing it. Once the beast knew someone was on its tail, it would run faster and farther than one could hope to follow. The secret to capturing one hinged upon getting ahead of the creature. He would find a place that the beast returned to frequently, someplace it felt safe. Gradually the trails revealed themselves, and they all seemed to lead to a single place.
#
Maribelle reclined, eyes half shut and mouth half open. The front of her armor was covered in crumbs from some manner of pastry, and a strong-smelling glass of bahk sat on the table beside her. As quietly as the wind rushing over the roadside weeds, her best blade approached. He stood before her for a moment before finally making his presence known with a deliberate scuff of his feet along the baked stone walkway running in front of her place of business.
“Ah,” she said, attempting as she always did to appear as though his appearance hadn't startled her. “Right on time, as usual. Follow me.”
She eased herself out of the chair and ambled toward the deserted section of the city. Out of justifiable paranoia, or perhaps out of eccentricity, she never seemed to keep the specifics of a job in the same building twice in a row. It meant that there was always a bit of a stroll before he could be told precisely what she was after. This time, the journey took them up the slope, toward the windmill at the high point of the town.
“You speak much Varden, Red?” she asked. She had a strange habit of engaging in idle chitchat as they walked, as though she were giving him mundane little errands to run, rather than sending him to take a life.
He shook his head.
“Millcrest. Refers to all the mills, see. That's what the blue-suits call these things here. The ones down by the water and this one up here. This town used to be part of Ulvard. For a while, the border went right through the middle. That was before the war, naturally. Couldn't tell you what they used to grind in these things. Before my time.” She began to breathe heavily as the slope got the better of her. By the time they had reached the windmill, she was mopping sweat from her brow. “I hate heading up here. Don't know why I even use this old place.”
She led the way around to the back of the windmill, where a large courtyard was roughly enclosed by a tall, decrepit fence. At some point in the last few years, a section of the bluff had sloughed off, taking a sizable portion of the fence with it. The water could be heard rushing below. Most of the courtyard was scattered with broken carts and carriages, as well as bits of machinery that were degraded well beyond recognition. The windmill itself was surprisingly intact, a tall, roundish stone structure with a long, low wooden building about the size of a stable attached at the base. He'd never come this close to it, and now something about the place was putting the Shadow on edge. He shifted his mask forward a bit and drew in a slow whiff of the air. There was nothing but the scent of rotten wood and grain.
Maribelle dug out her keys and began to flip through them.
“Well, I've got good news for you, Red,” she said. “Just one job on the list, and it's an easy one. Pays quite a bit, too.”
He stood silently.
“You interested?”
He nodded.
“You'll be helping get rid of someone who made an enemy of a few folks with deep pockets and not much respect for the sanctity of human life. Same as always, I suppose. Sound good?”
Again, he nodded.
Her expression hardened a bit. “You interested in the specifics?”
Another nod.
She rolled her eyes. “Maybe I haven't paid much attention, but I don't remember you being quite so quiet.”
He simply stared in reply.
“You got something against talking, Red? Something happen to your tongue?”
He shook his head.
“Then do me the courtesy of a yes or a no when I ask you a question. Now, do you want to help me get this job done?”
“Yes,” he said.
She turned her head vaguely to the side for a moment, then rolled her eyes again. “Yes what?”
“Yes, I want to help you get this job done. Please. Just tell me what I need to do.”
There was a trio of rattles from somewhere in the mill building, prompting him to snap his head in that direction. Nothing seemed to be swinging loose in the wind. He shifted his attention to Maribelle again just in time for her to open the windmill door.
“Good. Stay put. I expect the payment is as good as earned already,” she said, shutting the door again with him outside.
He stood alone in the courtyard, anxiety building steadily, though he could not pinpoint a cause. Another few sniffs turned up nothing worthy of alarm, but each passing moment made him more certain that something was wrong. He adjusted his mask again, now attempting to align his eyes more appropriately with the slits. He scanned the courtyard slowly. Tall grass pushing through the paving stones of the courtyard rustled in the wind. The barely visible shadow of the windmill's blades shifted and slid in the moonlight.
Then there was a motion, a glint of blue that flared and darted toward him. He sprang aside, dodging whatever it was and leaving it to shatter on the stones beside him. In a heartbeat, his hand was on the small dagger at his belt and his eyes were turned in the direction from which the blue stone had come. Then a sensation of raw, blinding pain wrapped itself around his leg.
Breath stuck in his throat as the pain drove further and further into him, cutting beyond mere flesh until he was certain it was tearing into his very soul. He looked to his leg and found that a pulsing tendril of black was curled around it. The darkness wasn't something physical, but rather a shifting and writhing ribbon of dark energy rolling across the surface of his leg. The spell blackened and deteriorated the hide of his trousers, then his flesh and fur until finally his leg failed him and he fell to the ground. The pain was so intense now he couldn't even wrestle enough air into his lungs to scream. When finally he was able to turn his teary eyes back to the world around him, he was surrounded by a series of figures, some of whom he didn't recognize, but several he did.
“Yes, that is certainly the voice of the elusive idiot who thought he could lock me away,” said the first figure, Duule. He gestured aside to one of the bulky cohorts who flanked him. “Hand out payments. Glad to see I've finally found a few people who can deliver.”
While his man rummaged through a sack over his shoulder and pulled out jingling bags of coins, Duule stepped forward and delivered a punishing boot to the downed malthrope's chest.
“I wouldn't waste any time finishing this one,” said Dihsaad, pocketing his payment.
“Oh, I assure you, he's breathing his last breaths. I've just got a few things to do first. You, with the sword. Get that mask off him. I want to see what he is with my own eyes,” Duule ordered.
Munn stepped forward, planting a boot on the Shadow's shoulder and roughly pulling the mask free. His beastly face revealed, all in observance recoiled, leaving him twisting on the grou
nd.
“It is one of those things,” Duule said, turning his head aside.
“I could have told you that. It certainly wasn't any human I was tracking,” said Dihsaad. “I'll tell you, that gem strand that hid our scent. I wouldn't mind having that. I could make a job like mine a good deal easier.”
“No, tracker. A one-of-a-kind item like that stays with me. I'm not in the business of donating priceless enchantments to the locals. Hand over the gems.”
Dihsaad shrugged and tossed the bag of loose gems to Duule. The criminal tugged it open and plucked one from inside, admiring it for a moment.
“Still. These things only work on mallies. Seems a shame to let them go to waste.”
He tossed the gem toward his prisoner. With a desperate heave aside, he managed to avoid being struck. The gem shattered with a spark of violet light, and a curl of smoky black energy curled forth like ink spreading in a glass of water. Then, as though it had a mind of its own, the energy struck, wrapping itself around the malthrope's arm and bringing a fresh wave of agony. His hand tightened, fingers curling like a dying spider.
A horrid smile twisted Duule's face.
“Remind me to acquire the services of a few wizards. They make some useful trinkets. Enough amusement. Munn, kill the thing before it finds a way to wriggle out of our grasp again.”
His henchmen nodded and grasped the creature by the tunic, hauling it from the ground. He twisted his weapon, leveling it with his victim's neck and bringing it close. The braid of gems was tied to the handle, and under its influence, the cutting edge of the weapon danced and shimmered with black and violet.
“I always wanted to see if I could get a head clean off in once slice,” he mused.
The others spread apart to give the executioner room as he recklessly took a few test swings, pulling the blade back and bringing it forward until it just barely touched the beast's neck. Satisfied with his technique, he brought the blade back and heaved it forward. The Shadow took that moment to thrust the heel of his good leg hard onto the foot of his attacker. At the same time, he threw his head back. The swing went wild, coming near enough to graze a few hairs of the beast's chin before the sword wrenched free of his grip, twirling off to clatter into to a bit of ancient equipment. The hulking brute stumbled and reeled, creature still in his grasp but struggling madly. The pair lurched toward the edge of the bluff, Munn fighting to steady himself and the malthrope doing all that he could to keep him off balance.
