“You would only slow me down,” Elias said as kindly as he could. “I love you like a brother, but stealthy and a fighter you are not. This isn’t a game of storm-the-castle. Lar, you don’t even own a sword.”
“I have a bow,” said Lar. “I’m sure your father or Phinneas here has an extra sword.”
“My father only has one sword, and I’m going to need it.” Elias put a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Someone’s going to die today, and it’s either Slade or me. This thing is between us and just us. You understand.”
“No, I don’t, and neither do you. If I was in your shoes, would you let me ride off all alone and half-cocked?”
Elias looked up at the towering Lar, who filled the doorway tidily, and sighed. “No, I don’t suppose I would.” He swayed on his feet and Lar put out his hands to steady him.
“Elias, are you alright?”
Elias put a hand to his head. “Fine. I’m just a little famished, I think. I better eat this bread before I go.” He returned to the bed and sat down. He broke off a piece of bread with a shaking hand. “Doctor, would you be so good as to fetch me a draught of water? Lar, why don’t you see if the doctor has anything here to pass for a weapon, and then go ready the horses.”
“Of course,” said Lar, who had no intention of doing any such thing, and with a nod motioned for Phinneas to join him in the hall.
Lar and Phinneas made their way to the kitchen, which smelt of roasted barley as Phinneas’s Housekeeper, Agnes, had set fresh bread to bake. Phinneas went to the well bucket, while Lar poured himself a shot of whiskey.
“That was a close call,” Lar said. “I can’t believe we almost let him go.”
“Don’t worry, son,” Phinneas said, as he rummaged for the butter crock and some cheese. “That Slade character is long gone by now.”
Lar whirled on the doctor, incredulous. “What? Are you bloody kidding me? What about trusting your instincts and you’re like you father? Bloody horse manure!”
“Lar, take a breath. I do trust Elias’s instincts. Slade likely is a highly trained assassin and arcanist who came to Knoll to settle accounts with Padraic, and if anyone can bring him to justice, it will be Elias—eventually. He is his father’s son. That having been said, a man clever enough to have designed this elaborate ruse and catch Padraic Duana unawares, is too smart to not have gone to ground. Skilled enough to take down an unarmed Padraic Duana he may be, but a lone swordsman loitering about at the risk of taking on an entire posse and the Constabulary of Knoll Creek? No, I think not.”
Lar shook his head. “You were actually going to just let him loose on a wild goose chase? I don’t believe it.”
“Listen, son,” Phinneas said softly as a sharp pain stabbed in his bosom, “we are all hurt by this tragedy, but no one more than that boy.”
“On that we can agree,” Lar replied, deflating once more.
Phinneas sat down opposite Lar, at his black-oak kitchen table, and reached for the whiskey bottle. “I’ve seen many men in a hard way in my long career as a physician, and it’s always the same. First, after the shock from the loss settles, comes the anger. It seems a terrible thing, but it’s good, because it protects the aggrieved, insulates him against what he can’t accept. Elias is no different. Thoughts of revenge are all that he has to sustain him now. Once that’s used up, only the cold reality of his situation will remain, and I don’t know if he can survive that.”
Phinneas’s eyes grew wet, and Lar found himself tearing up as well. “For the survivor’s guilt,” Phinneas said, “can kill him as surely as an arrow through the heart.”
“So, as your cure, you thought to let him ride off in that condition.”
Phinneas sighed. “I watched that boy grow. I know how stubborn he can be. He was determined to ride out, and he needs to blow off some steam. Truth be told his wound is minor, all things considered. The arrow tore through the muscle just under his clavicle, but skated his scapula and major arteries.”
Lar looked at him blankly. “You must have me confused with someone who’s schoolin’ didn’t end at age fourteen.”
“You are a great deal smarter than you look, Master Fletcher. My point is that his is the cleanest arrow wound I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot. I used my good Erastean serpent gut to stitch him. Those stitches won’t come loose unless he pulls them out with his own teeth.” Phinneas pulled at his aquiline nose thoughtfully. “Come to think of it, I’m rather perplexed as to why he was unconscious for so long.”
Lar shuddered, for he had sat with Elias during his long and fitful slumber. Like a man in the delirium of yellow fever, Elias talked in his sleep, at times raving to people not present, calling out strange names, and rambling gibberish or else speaking in some tongue unknown to Lar.
Lar looked into his whiskey glass. Realizing it was empty, he reached for the bottle, but Phinneas laid a hand on his forearm. “Not so fast, son,” the doctor said. “We’ll need our wits about us today, if we’re to be of any service to Elias.”
Lar conceded Phinneas’s point with a nod. “Speaking of which, we should get back to him.”
The two men, laden with victuals and supplies, returned to Elias’s room. Lar, who entered the room first, cursed and dropped the flagon of water he carried. Phinneas, close on Lar’s heels, bumped into him, his view obstructed by the larger man. “What is it?” Phinneas cried.
Lar stepped into the room and indicated the open window with his now empty hand. “He’s pulled the wool over our heads. He’s escaped.”
Chapter 7
Return to Mayfair Manor
Elias rode hard for home. Anxiety quickened his heart, and his pulse thundered with the beat of the horse’s hooves, for he knew time was against him. His every fiber screamed at him to get to Mayfair Manor as fast as possible.
Even though Phinneas’s argument made perfect sense and logic suggested that the Manor would be the last place Slade would hide out, he felt a certainty that he would find the fiend there, as if someone had whispered it into his mind and bid him to act against all peril and return there with all the haste he could muster. If Danica’s body hadn’t been recovered, there was a chance, however slim, that she yet lived, but every passing moment decreased the likelihood of that scant hope.
An electric jolt of pins-and-needles rushed up his spine and crashed over the crown of his head like a wave.
Some dozen years ago, when his father came to him in the pre-dawn light, as he woke he knew that his mother had died. He knew it as certainly as he knew the sun rose in the east. The knowledge was simply there in his mind, and so it was now. He had to return to the Manor, and quickly.
With that cold certainty came the knowledge that he could not fail, that he would not fail. Slade would fall by his father’s sword. The tingling sensation that crept over him increased manifold and Elias shivered despite the midday sun. He felt a peculiar dislocation from his body, as if it were being piloted by someone other than himself.
Elias swallowed his heart and tried to turn his thoughts to more mundane matters so that he might ease his anxiety, but his mind rapidly returned to Slade. He channeled the rage and impotence he felt at having been so handily duped by the cunning assassin into focusing on how he would defeat him. He played through the duel in his mind’s-eye, envisioning the differing styles and strategies his father had taught him.
Slade used a scimitar, so Elias could count on him slashing primarily and thrusting rarely, if ever. Elias decided to adopt a high guard as Slade would most likely strike at his head and throat to end the battle quickly, and a wide front-facing stance to keep his legs from becoming easy targets. With a rapier a strike to the forward leg proved a deadly gambit, for while it wounded the recipient, the defender could still muster the strength to run the attacker through. A scimitar, however, could cut your legs out from underneath you, and the fight would be over in short order.
The scimitar was a heavier weapon, favored by the desert tribes and principalities of Aradur
. To properly wield the weapon required more strength than the duelists of Peidra needed to make effective use of the rapier. As such, Elias assumed Slade would come in fast and hard and try to overwhelm him with brawn and a heavy-handed, offensive style. This left the distiller with a couple of counter strategies to consider. Slade would tire quickly wielding the heavy scimitar, so Elias could assume an evasive style and wear down Slade’s stamina, or he could do the unexpected and launch an aggressive attack himself.
While the rapier was the fashionable weapon of the day in Galacia, it was not always so, and Padraic taught his son styles for the long and broad swords as well. Padraic’s own, exotic blade was somewhere between a rapier and a scimitar in design, though Elias had only espied the elegant weapon a handful of times. His father kept his past tidily locked up in a trunk in his room.
Elias snapped out of his musings as he thundered across the open prairie that preceded his family estate. The sight of his lifelong home, a glaring symbol of all he had lost, brought his blood back up, but beneath his fury lay a scarcely restrained hysteria.
Elias dismounted before his horse came to a full stop and bounded into his house. He didn’t pause in the sitting chamber where he and his father had enjoyed passing the time with an idle game of cards or a glass of Knoll and a smoke. His father only had life in his memories now, and to dwell on that fact would be too painful. The slim chance that Danica might yet live kept the breath in his lungs and one foot stepping in front of the other. Where he went next, though, it would prove hard not to face the ghost of Padraic Duana.
Elias opened the door to his father’s room. Keeping his eyes focused on his feet, he walked to the foot of the bed and dropped to a knee. With a grunt of effort he pulled out the chest that had hidden under the bed for the better part of two decades. The lid and the brass bands of the oak chest swam with flowing, archaic runes.
He had seen his father gazing into the chest shortly after his mother had died. When he asked what was in it, his father answered, “The past, son, and that is where it is best left.” Despite his father’s evasive answer, Elias had always known what the chest contained. Pausing momentarily to wonder if his father warded his effects, Elias threw open the lid.
He heard a sharp snap, like the crack of a whip, and an electric tingle rushed up his fingers and to his shoulder before dissipating across his back. He eyed his hand and shook it, but it seemed no worse for the wear, so he dismissed the occurrence and looked into the trunk.
First, he withdrew Padraic’s hat. Crafted from well-worn brown leather, the wide brimmed rancher hat was reminiscent of an earlier era. Viewed as a rustic accoutrement, the rancher hat fell out of fashion in Peidra and the more urbane areas of Galacia. Similarly, the Marshal had largely gone the way of the rancher hat, viewed by many as a vestigial office necessitated by a more lawless time. The crown still retained Marshals in its service, but enforcing the law of the land presently fell largely into the purview of the more bureaucratic and less militant constabulary.
Elias donned the hat.
Next, he removed his father’s duster, made from supple brown leather, with a thick fur lining the inside of the coat. In one of the pockets was a similarly worked pair of gloves. A further examination revealed that the fur lining could be removed by undoing a series of buttons, and vents under the arms could also be unbuttoned. As a result, the duster served to keep one warm in the winter and cool in the summer months. After making the appropriate adjustments, Elias pulled his father’s coat on.
There were but two items left in the chest: his father’s badge of office and his sword. Elias’s heart quickened as he reached for the blade and found the metal of the scabbard warm to the touch. The scabbard had been crafted from a light but durable metal and was finished with a gleaming crimson flecked with black. Pins and needles climbed up Elias’s arms and spread throughout his core as he ran his fingers along the glossy surface.
He wrapped a hand around the braided leather hilt and, placing a thumb on the ovular guard, he eased the sword from the scabbard. Characters in a runic language foreign to him were etched into the base of the blade, and as the sword cleared the scabbard the room echoed with sibilant whispers, seeming to issue from all around him. Alarmed, Elias slammed the blade back into the scabbard and lurched to his feet. He spun on his heels, examining the room, half expecting to encounter a shade.
Much to his relief, Elias found himself alone. Nevertheless, he remained vigilant for several heartbeats and continued to scan the room and listen for any sign of a maleficent force. Once satisfied, his gaze returned to the sword, which he had dropped in his alarm.
It was an alluring weapon, of that there was no doubt. Even sheathed, it had an elegant line that curved slightly in the fashion of a saber, but with an elongated hilt to accommodate two hands, and a unique ovular guard, the likes of which he had never seen. The blade had evidently been enchanted to boot. Elias decided, however, that the sword, whatever its nature, had belonged to his father and therefore was not inherently evil.
Elias reminded himself that he was in a hurry. Gathering his resolve, he snatched up his father’s sword, and with one fluid motion drew the blade. If before the room echoed, it now resounded with spirant voices uttering slippery words that stacked on one another with invisible weight, like wind blowing through a hollow, winter wood. Elias held fast, fear pushed aside by his need, and added his voice to the chorus, crying out against his rage and misery.
The runes etched in the blade glowed scarlet, as if in remembrance of the fires that had forged them. The room spun and tendrils of force lashed at him, visible only as a distortion in the air like heat waves, and wrapped around his limbs and torso, as insubstantial as wind but as unyielding as steel cord.
Still, Elias refused to relinquish his hold on the sword. His eyes could not focus for the vertigo, but he felt his right arm burning as if on fire. Overcome, Elias grew faint.
Unconscious on his feet, he crumpled to the floor.
†
Lar urged his borrowed steed into a gallop as soon as he cleared the gate of the doctor’s homestead. It had taken him precious time to find a suitable horse among the doctor’s scant offerings and saddle it, as Elias had taken his, but Lar planned on heading Elias off by plotting a course directly for the Manor. Elias, Lar reasoned, would go home first to equip himself for battle. Lar had agreed with Phinneas that the marauders that felled the Duanas were likely long gone, but as he rode his stomach dropped and he realized that he was afraid.
Out of the corner of his eye, Lar saw a blur of motion and turned in his saddle, one hand reflexively reaching for his sword. A rider approached on an intercept course. He was too far away to distinguish any facial features, but he saw a shock of red hair undulating in the wind.
“Britches!” Lar cursed under his breath. It was the woman from the fair who pulled Elias’s bacon out of the pan—Lady Bryn Denar.
Lar rode to meet to her. He reined in his horse and asked without preamble, “What are you doing here? My Lady,” he added as an afterthought.
Bryn, who stood in her stirrups, sat in her saddle and caught her breath. “Word travels fast in Knoll Creek. I figured something was amiss when the Mayor cancelled our audience.” She fixed cobalt eyes on Lar. “But this... The constable told me that Elias lives, but is mortally wounded. Is this true?”
“No. He is anything but. The Doctor has restored him—mostly. He was arrowed through the shoulder, but it has done little to slow him down or his damn mule-headed stubbornness. He escaped through a window at old Phinneas’s when we went to fetch him some food. He insisted a merchant by the name of Slade is responsible for the ambush and has taken my horse to pursue him. For some reason, he thinks this merchant waits for him at the Manor. At first I thought him crazy with grief, but I’ve begun to get a bad feeling about all this. I’m going to head him off.”
“And if there is battle, you intend to fight with that?” Bryn motioned at the ancient sword Lar had stuck int
o his saddle bags. “It looks like an heirloom you pulled off a wall.” Lar blushed, for that is exactly where he had procured the dusty blade, from over the doctor’s mantle.
“It was the best I could manage.”
“Here,” Bryn said as she produced a sword from under her riding cape, “take this.”
Lar took the proffered weapon and examined it quickly. It was a rapier, Kveshian by the look of it. Longer and thicker than its Phyrian and Galacian counterparts, the Kveshian rapier proved adroit in a duel as well as open combat. Lar knew little of academics, but he had paid attention during military history. “Thank-you, Lady Denar. Can I ask, where are you going? My Lady.”
“I’m coming with you. If Duana’s instincts are correct, we just may be riding into a fight, so, under the circumstances, I think we can do away with titles. Call me Bryn.”
“Right, but why?”
“Because that’s my name.” Bryn eyed the imposing farmer, who looked back at her with poker-perfect deadpan. She sighed. “I am an agent of Crown Law, so this kind of thing concerns me. That having been said, I can’t help but shoulder some of the responsibility for this. I should have put the clues together sooner.”
Lar pressed his mount closer to Bryn. “What do you mean?”
“I didn’t come to Knoll Creek to collect taxes, but this is neither the time nor the place to discuss this. Are you with me or not?”
Lar gave Bryn an appraising look, but truth be told he was glad for the company. “Aye,” he said, “I’m with you. But, you have given me your sword, how will you fight if it comes to that?”
“I shall manage just fine. Now, get off that horse.” When Lar’s sole response was to frown down at her, she sighed again, but she wore an easy smirk. “That horse you’re riding looks like its back is about to break. I think you outweigh it by a stone, whereas my gelding is from the queen’s stables and has the fortitude begotten of a millennia old, storied bloodline. Let’s switch mounts so that we can recoup the time we’ve lost here talking about the weather.”
Reckoning (The Empyrean Chronicle) Page 8
