Friendly Fire

by Dale Lucas

  Indilen shook her head, smiling brightly in the dark. “Not at all,” she said. “We’re not always from the place where we belong.”

  She rose on her toes and kissed him. Behind them the door to the apartment opened with the creak of old, unoiled hinges. Their kiss broke, and they both turned to find Torval standing in the doorway, occupying most of its width but only about two-thirds of its height.

  “I thought I heard bandits out here on my threshold,” Torval said. “Shall you vacate the premises with only a warning, or must I be rough with you?”

  Rem stepped away from Indilen. “Don’t make me let her off the leash, old stump. She’s a pretty thing, but she’s got teeth and claws.”

  Indilen slapped him playfully, then stepped toward Torval. “And more brains than either of you. Good evening, master dwarf.” She bent and kissed Torval’s bald pate, and Rem thought he saw his partner flash a self-satisfied smile.

  “You’re most welcome in my home on this auspicious night, lass. Come inside, it’s freezing out here.”

  Torval stepped inside to free the doorway, and Indilen moved past him. As Rem stepped forward, Torval blocked the door again.

  “Hold, you,” he said in mock sternness. “The lady’s welcome, but you’re a stranger hereabouts, and little do I like the look of you.”

  “Out of my way, old stump, or I’ll make you bleed.”

  Torval stepped aside to let Rem step in. “In your dreams, Bonny Prince. In your dreams …”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The hour was late when the Fhryst service adjourned, the remembrances sung, the scriptures recited, the prayers of thanksgiving and petition all offered and done. In the wake of the last pious petitioner’s exit and the dismissal of the temple acolytes, Bjalki and his fellow clerics undertook the slow, steady business of ordering the altars, securing the sacraments, and closing the temple for the night. Afterward they could return to their quarters and sit down with the temple priestesses and acolytes for their own Fhryst feast and a private service.

  Bjalki was glad of it. It had been a long, tiring day, and he craved the good food and easy atmosphere that a holiday feast would provide for him. He thought the others might feel the same, for even craggy old Hrothwar and perpetually distracted Haefred seemed intent on expediting their separate postservice labors and clearing the way for the feast to come as quickly as possible. True to her position as leader of all holy services, Therba had assigned their tasks. Hrothwar had been charged with seeing the doors shut and the temple torches all dowsed, leaving only the undying flame burning in the brazier upon the forward dais. Meanwhile Haefred organized the scrolls used in the service and saw them restored to their home shelves in their proper order. Having received the two simplest tasks, the old priests were both finished before Therba had completed her reorganization of the holy sacraments in their consecrated arks, or Bjalki had finished dousing each of the hundreds of lit and flickering prayer lamps that bedecked the temple pillars and outer walls.

  Bjalki’s was an arduous task, but he took a special pleasure in it. During services, petitioners might light these lamps as they arrived, saying a special, direct prayer as the flame of the taper ignited the lamp oil. Now that the service was done and the petitioners all departed, someone had to extinguish the flames, one by one, offering a prayer for the petitioner who had lit each. With the torches that lined the temple’s outer walls already doused, and the prayer lamps fast following, the darkness closed in by inches around Bjalki, and he found himself more than a little enamored of it. He half wished he could stay here alone when the others had gone, to soak up the solemn silence and shadows and contemplate eternity—and his place in it—while staring at the undying flame.

  He had just doused the last lamp on a particular pillar, leaving only a few in a pair of side niches still burning, when Docent Therba interrupted him.

  “Go below,” she said. “See to the shrines and lower sanctuaries. I’ll snuff the last lamps.”

  He nodded and began to walk up the aisle. “Are Hrothwar and Haefred already gone?”

  Therba, bustling back down the aisle toward the still-flickering lamps, nodded. “I dismissed them. Hurry now. We’ve a feast awaiting us.”

  Bjalki nodded and mounted the forward dais, before the altar and the sacramental arks. “As you wish, khoyra,” Bjalki said, using an old, affectionate term that the common tongue might render as revered speaker. It was an affectation, addressing her so, but Bjalki hoped she heard the warmth in his voice and took it as the genuine show of respect and affection that it was.

  He moved past the altar and its attendant sacraments, then rounded behind the great stone edifice to start a circuit of the quartet of doorways that led from the main worship space into the outer chapels. As Bjalki saw to his tasks—starting with sealing up the four lesser chapels dedicated to specific gods and accessed by worshippers and the clergy only for specific purposes—Therba moved about in the gathering gloom of the great sanctuary, praying softly to herself as she doused the last of the lamps.

  Bjalki’s movements were rote, instinctive. The lesser chapels were open to any and all during the day, or during services, but once services were done and the late bells rung, those chambers had to be locked, the treasures within protected through the night. He closed them often, and thus had adopted a routine, involving a sort of drumbeat rhythm in his head that corresponded to his actions: close, lock, test the door, pocket the key. As he went about that business, the younger priest found his conscious mind drifting elsewhere—to his wife and children, hundreds of miles away and several more miles belowground, in the Ironwall Mountains. He had not kept a Fhryst meal with them in—How long was it now? Ten years? A short time in dwarven terms, perhaps, but still, to his lonely and tiring heart, a seeming eternity. He missed the joy of reciting the creation story, of lighting and then dousing the ceremonial candles, of watching as his daughters hung on his every word and spoke the ritual responses when prompted. And Wettelin’s bread. No one baked better onion-barley bread than his wife.

  He knew that the feast to come in the temple refectory would be a good one—the wine spiced, the beer frothy, the meats steaming, and the bread fresh from the ovens—but there always seemed to be less to love in a meal taken with the familiar strangers who constituted his family away from home here in Yenara, while his own true family was so far away. Perhaps, once the meal was done and everyone retired, Bjalki would stay up late and write a letter to his wife, his daughters, his youngest son. Even if they would not receive his missive for weeks, it would still do his heart good to be alone in his chambers and to think of them, to record words of love and support for them that he knew they would read.

  As though he’d been sleepwalking, Bjalki realized that he had just completed his final task: closing and locking the gates to the lower shrines and sanctuaries. Though there was nothing of material value to steal down there—lower sanctuaries were the dens of austere, chthonic powers, meant to be neither comfortable nor welcoming—the clergy were still in the habit of locking the wooden door and the iron gate that led below.

  His work done, Bjalki turned and mounted the steps that would take him from the lower staircase back up to the sanctuary level. Reaching the surface, he could tell that the last of the lamps had been doused by Docent Therba. The sanctuary was now so dark as to almost be tomb-like, the only light yet burning the undying flame in its ceremonial stone brazier near the altar. As Bjalki rounded the altar from the rear, he saw Therba waiting there, her back to the altar, staring out into the dark vastness of the sanctuary, as though she could see something lurking out there that the absence of light rendered all but invisible.

  “Why do you linger, khoyra?” Bjalki asked as he approached. “The feast is waiting. We should—”

  Therba raised a single hand: Silence. She said nothing. She did not move. Her eyes stared fixedly into the tenebrous shadows that stretched away beyond the altar and the dais. Bjalki let his eyes follow the line of Therb
a’s gaze. As the night vision that his people were renowned for took over and brought the sanctuary and its contents into sharper relief against the shadows, Bjalki suddenly saw what had drawn the docent’s attention.

  They were not alone.

  Scattered throughout the sanctuary—in the aisles, among the benches, guarding the doors—were a number of strangers. They were not dwarves, but tall folk, somber and silent, all wrapped in the dark, ashy cloaks of mourners and wearing strange, pale masks that hid their faces. Many carried clubs and bludgeons. A few bore buckets and pails, though Bjalki could not see what they contained. Their silence persisted. Whether they were waiting for Therba to speak or daring her to, Bjalki could not say.

  “Who are you?” the docent finally asked. Her voice was hoarse, dry, two stones slowly rubbed together.

  One of the men stepped forward. Even masked, he was most impressive—wide of shoulder, strong armed. “We are the ghosts of Fhrystings past,” the masked man said, “come to show you the error of your ways.”

  Bjalki took a step forward and opened his mouth to speak—but Therba stopped him. She took a long stride that placed her right at the head of the dais steps. She addressed the intruders sternly, but without malice.

  “If you speak of the Fhrysting, you know this night is sacred,” she said.

  “Sacred to you lot, aye,” one of the other masked men answered. He stood just a little forward of the leader, his frame smaller, his voice a little more reedy. “Pardon us if your feast days do little to instill reverence in our cold, dead hearts.”

  “You are no spirits,” Therba snarled. “You’re men of flesh and blood. Enough of this foolishness—”

  “We were living, once,” another man said from his place farther down the center aisle, “before your kind stole our honor and our livelihoods from us.”

  Bjalki heard himself speaking before he realized that he wanted to speak. “Our people take nothing that we do not earn! How dare you come into this holy place and—”

  Before he had finished, the nearest intruder shot forward, grabbed Therba by her priestly robes, and yanked her down off the dais onto the stone floor of the central aisle. The old woman’s ceremonial stave clattered on the flags. She grunted when she hit the ground, for she hit hard. As Bjalki watched, frozen by fear, the man who’d thrown her down snatched up handfuls of her robes again and dragged her farther up the aisle, toward his masked companions. Therba landed in a heap at the feet of their leader and the men closest to him.

  Something in the leader’s tentative step back told Bjalki that the man was shocked to find Therba cast down before him. A stunned silence settled on them all, the masked men looking back and forth to one another, as if wondering what came next.

  Bjalki forced himself to step forward now. “Please,” he said, “I beg you, don’t hurt her—”

  Then the wiry man with the reedy voice turned back to Bjalki. “You want the old woman back?” he said. “Earn her.”

  The leader said something, too softly for Bjalki to hear. The wiry man answered, but his response escaped Bjalki as well.

  “I’m begging you,” Bjalki said. “This is a holy night. There’s no reason for violence—”

  “There is every reason for violence,” the wiry one said. “Two men, up here. Grab the other one.”

  Bjalki realized that “the other one” was he. He turned and tried to flee but crashed into the stone brazier where the undying flame flickered in the gloom. He moved to scurry around it, but it was too late. He felt strong hands grab his arms and yank him backward, whirling him around so that he was facing back up the aisle, into the sanctuary, where Therba stood surrounded by the masked intruders.

  The wiry man with the reedy voice waved his hand—a summons. A larger man—one who had not spoken so far—answered the thin man’s silent command and stepped forward, towering over Therba.

  “Treat with us honestly,” Bjalki said, struggling against his captors’ iron grips and realizing it was pointless. “You need not even take off your masks—but tell us, what can we do for you? What restitution can we offer?”

  The wiry man stepped forward, leaving the captive Therba in his wake. A few of those closest to the leader closed in, tightening their cordon around the dwarven priestess. A pair of the masked men—including the leader—seemed to be engaged in a war of whispered words. But whatever they were saying, it did not change the fact that Therba was now surrounded. The docent, meanwhile, was feeling about, trying to reach her ceremonial stave, which lay about two arm’s lengths off to her left.

  “It would have been better for you if you hadn’t been here,” the broad-shouldered leader said, shoving his way forward, and Bjalki thought he heard real remorse in the man’s voice. “Now you shall have to bear witness to our grim work.”

  “And what work is that?” Bjalki asked, helpless in the grip of the two men who held him.

  “Justice will be done,” the leader said.

  There was a sudden commotion. Farther down the aisle, Therba had managed to snatch up her ceremonial stave again and now struggled to her feet. The men were trying to keep her down, but Therba managed to gain her feet and turn to face them. Then, to Bjalki’s great astonishment, the docent thumped the man nearest her with her stave.

  “Bjalki, run!” she cried. “Bring the Swords of Eld!”

  Bjalki could not run, even if he’d been free to do so. He could only watch, horrified, as the masked men closed in around Therba as she swung her stave back and forth, threatening them.

  “Stop her!” the leader of the masked men roared. “Get that stave away from her!”

  “End her!” the wiry man barked. “Someone!”

  “No!” the leader shouted in answer, and Bjalki realized that there really was a conflict among them. The wiry man was urging violence, while their brawny leader seemed to be trying to avoid it.

  “I have no fear of you!” Therba shouted, strong and sure as Bjalki had ever seen her. “Invade our house of worship, will you? With masks, like bandits? What shameful creatures you are!”

  “Therba,” Bjalki shouted, struggling against his captors again, “stop it!”

  The stave kept cutting the air. It came close to a couple of the masked men, but both dodged it. A third tried to step in from the side and got a faceful of the big gilded stick. As he went reeling, two more men, at Therba’s back, dove in and tried to subdue the old dwarven priestess. One managed to almost get his arms locked around Therba’s frame, but her dwarven shoulders were too broad. She shrugged off the man’s bear hug easily and swung round, bringing her swishing stave with her. The other man who had been behind her tried to dive in under a strike from the stave, but collided with it instead. It came down hard on his skull and he hit the flagstones of the temple aisle, unmoving.

  Therba suddenly stopped her thrashing and striking. She seemed to be in shock, as though her naturally compassionate instincts had taken over in answer to the harshness of her attack.

  “Hold her!” someone shouted now amid the chaos.

  Yet another intruder lunged in from Therba’s left. The priestess dropped her stave and tried to rush to the side of the man she’d knocked cold, but the newcomer had her in a sloppy hold and wouldn’t set her free.

  “Let me go!” Therba shouted. “I want no more of this! Your companion, he’s bleeding! Let me tend him!”

  A number of the masked men had crowded round their fallen comrade now.

  “He’s bleeding!” someone cried.

  Bjalki heard a rip and saw one of the masked men force his way forward. He held a scrap of his dark gray cloak in his hand. He drew back the cowl of the fallen man, found where he bled, on his scalp, and pressed the scrap of cloak there.

  Therba was still struggling. “She’s disarmed!” the leader shouted, now lost behind a line of his jostling men, all trying either to help subdue Therba or to attend to their fallen comrade. “Let her go!”

  Bjalki heard the knife before he saw it. A slithering sound
: steel rasping as it was drawn from a sheath. He lunged forward, desperate to break away from the men holding him, to stop what was about to happen. His mouth was open, he was about to cry out to warn the docent … and then it was too late.

  The man holding Therba released her. She stumbled forward, clearly heading for the man she’d laid out on the flagstones with that head strike. As she moved, almost lost among a press of tall human bodies and whipping, slate gray cloaks, one of the men—the tall, wiry one, Bjalki thought—stepped into Therba’s path. There was a blade in his hand, glinting in the near darkness. It flashed for the briefest instant, then disappeared up to the hilt in Therba’s robes. The old priestess gasped. Wheezed. Choked.

  Bjalki thought he heard one of the men say, “Aemon! What have you done?”

  Then the press of bodies crowding around Therba dispersed. Everyone scurried backward, as though they wanted no part of what had just occurred. Only two men stayed close to Therba: the one whose knife now violated the docent’s body, and another who seemed to be bracing her from behind. For a moment Therba stood frozen, the blade in her belly, knotty old hands grasping at her attacker’s tunic and cloak. Then the knifeman twisted the blade—he must have, for Therba gasped and shuddered. A moment later, with a shudder and a thin exhalation, Therba fell against her attacker and slid to the floor.

  “Aemon’s bones,” one of Bjalki’s captors muttered, clearly shocked.

  The other exhibited neither surprise nor remorse. “Dwarven bitch,” he snarled. “Let her bleed.”

  The knifeman stood above his victim, blade in hand, its steel stained dark red, Therba’s blood on his hands. One nearby masked man clapped the knifeman on the shoulder. Two others stepped away, as though they had no desire to be blamed for the sudden escalation in violence. A fourth bent over a nearby bench and vomited.

  “What did you do?” the big leader whispered. His voice was low, strangled, but Bjalki heard him clearly nonetheless. He sounded just as shocked and frightened and enraged as Bjalki himself felt.