by Alex Bledsoe
chapter
TWO
I
shimmied back into the world. That’s really how it felt, like different parts of me were yanked into consciousness and then shaken to make sure they were awake. It’s not the best way to wake up, and it definitely affects your temper.
The air around me was warm and scented with medicinal incense. I lay flat on my stomach, one eye buried in the pillow, the other showing me a flat expanse of white wall. I took a deep breath, harder to do than it should have been, and said, “Anybody there?” My voice sounded thin and weak.
A blurry head-shaped mass appeared in front of me, at an odd angle because of my own position. “Back with us, then?” a woman’s voice asked.
I blinked a couple of times, and her face resolved. She had gray hair and kindly eyes that belied her no-nonsense tone. She wore flowing robes and at her throat hung the crescent symbol marking her as a moon priestess, a religious sect that flourished in this part of the world. “I’m Donna Bennings. You’re in the moon goddess hospital, just outside Neceda. Can you understand me, Mr. LaCrosse?”
“Yeah,” I said, mostly into the drool-damp spot on my pillow.
“Can you repeat it back to me?” she asked.
“It back to me,” I repeated. I began to roll onto my back, and she moved to help, cradling my head. The maneuver exhausted me, and I closed my eyes. My skull was three times too large, and a throbbing mass clung to the back of it. My chest felt too small for my lungs. “Okay, that’s enough work for one day,” I said.
“Do you ever put in a full day’s work?” a familiar voice asked. Like mine, it sounded weak and tired.
I turned my gigantic cranium enough to see Liz Dumont seated beside me, bent forward with her elbows on the edge of the bed. She wore a tight tunic blouse and men’s-style trousers with high boots. Her short red hair was matted and strands fell into her equally red eyes. The harsh light from the window highlighted the crow’s-feet and smile lines on her face. She needed a bath, a change of clothes and some serious rest. I thought she was the most beautiful sight in the world. “Did you go out in public like that?” I asked.
“You’re no picnic yourself.” Her hand found mine in the tangle of blankets. “And watching you sleep is just as exciting as it sounds.”
Liz was, for lack of a better term, my girlfriend. It seemed an odd word for a relationship between two people our age, but no other one applied. She was a freelance courier, moving everything from documents to livestock as needed. Two years ago she’d come to Angelina’s tavern to deliver something to me, and I hadn’t let her out of my sight since. Besides being beautiful, intelligent, tough and inexplicably smitten with me, she was the only other person in the world whose judgment I consistently trusted.
“Now you can get some sleep, too,” Bennings said to Liz. The priestess lifted my eyelids higher than I expected. “Hm. Well, you seem to truly be on the mend. We’ve been giving you some elixirs and doing a few simple noninvasive spells for your recovery. But you’ll be feeling that head for a while, I imagine.”
“Better than not feeling it,” I said.
“Yes. I’ll leave you two alone to catch up on things, and check back later.”
After she left, I looked around the room. The moon goddess hospital was well-known, if mysterious, to most of Neceda’s population. It had been here for three generations, training apprentices as well as caring for the injured. The knot of small buildings was constructed over hot springs, and their heat could be channeled into the structures to keep the rooms at reasonably constant temperatures. The walls inside and out were whitewashed, while the door bore the universal red-pentagram symbol of the place’s purpose. It could accommodate about twenty patients, two to a room if necessary. A fence surrounded the compound, crucial since a constantly rotating population of young females lived within it.
The priestesses, called “Mother” once they reached a certain rank, and their trainees were skilled in herbal therapy and pain management. Neceda, a wide-open river town, appreciated this service even if officially King Archibald frowned on the order, whose hidden rites were the source of many scandalous rumors. I knew of the place by reputation, but luckily had never needed its services before now. Guess my luck had changed.
I turned to Liz. “How long have I been out?”
“A week.”
“A week?”
She tenderly brushed a stray lock of hair from my eyes. “They brought you in the morning after you left for Tallega. At first they told me you were dead. They kept you on sleep herbs for the first four days. You were pretty much written off, and they didn’t see any need for you to suffer. Then when you didn’t die, they decided to see if you’d come out of it. I told them a blow to your head was the least likely way to kill you, since it couldn’t hit anything vital.”
I grinned. “You’re a bitch when you don’t sleep.”
“Then scoot over,” she said, and without waiting climbed onto the narrow bed with me. I put my arm under her neck, and she draped one leg over mine. I winced as the weight came down on my injured side. “Ow,” I gasped.
“Oops, sorry,” she said as she adjusted. “Is that better?”
“Perfect,” I said, and meant it.
She rested her hand on my chest, a possessive gesture that made me glad to be possessed. I pulled her as close as my weakened condition allowed and kissed the top of her head. She was asleep within five minutes.
I lay awake and stared at the blank white wall. A week had passed, plenty of time for the trail to grow cold. But however long it took, I knew I had a date with three certain gentlemen, one of whom had dragons on his boots. Until I found them, that final image of what they’d done to Laura Lesperitt would be the first thing I saw in my mind each day.
I perfected the skill of playing dead and found out a lot. People always talk freely around the unconscious.
I learned from the gossipy apprentices who checked on me at night that a farmer had discovered me at the bottom of a ravine beside the corpse of a girl and a horse’s carcass. The farmer threw me and the girl in his wagon and brought us into town; he didn’t even realize I was still alive. He did not leave his name, and had not been back to check on me. Understandable, if he thought he was just dropping off two anonymous dead bodies.
Likewise, no one had come to claim the girl’s remains. The hospital staff did not even know her name.
These teenage apprentices found all this very mysterious and sexy. Their speculation about me and my occupation (“He’s a sword jockey, you know; you don’t get to be one unless you’re really good with women. . . .”) made it a challenge to keep the smile off my allegedly sleeping face. I had a hard time picturing tough, matronly Mother Bennings ever being one of these giggly girls.
Although my rescuer was a no-show, I learned that someone else had stopped in to check on me. My second conscious morning I overheard Bennings tell Liz about “that man” who had been around to ask about me again. They stepped outside to discuss it in the hall, but since they left the door open, I still heard everything. My first thought was of the man with dragon boots, but this didn’t sound like him.
“Did he leave a name this time?” Liz asked.
“No, he just asked if Mr. LaCrosse was going to be okay. I was with a patient and couldn’t talk to him, but the girl who did said he seemed kind of squirrelly. Sound like anyone your friend might know?”
“Sounds like most of the people he might know,” Liz said wryly. “You said he was an older man?”
“That’s what the girls said. I told them to come get me if he shows up again, even if I’m with someone.”
If Liz replied, I didn’t hear it. Concentrating so hard made my head hurt, so I drifted back to sleep.
On the third morning Liz touched my hand and, when I opened my eyes, said, “You’ve got a visitor.”
She stepped aside, and a wide-shouldered man with heavy eyebrows moved closer. He looked me over, then nodded at the bandages wound tight
to my skull. “I’ve seen better heads on cabbage.”
“Every time you look in the mirror,” I said.
Gary Bunson managed a smile. It was not an expression his features accepted willingly. He was the local head magistrate, a king’s agent content to let Neceda’s vices run rampant as long as no one got hurt and he got his cut. He was younger than me, but his ravaged complexion and gray-streaked hair made him look several years older, and his uniform always seemed too large, as if he were gradually wasting away inside it. He could be as vicious as a snapping turtle, but preferred the tortoise approach: slow, steady and willing to withdraw into his shell if things got sticky. He said, “I would’ve hoped that a good blow to the head would’ve made you funnier.”
“We can try a blow to your head next time.” I slid up into something like a seated position. “So what happened to me?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. The fellow who brought you in said he found you out in the Black River Hills, but he left town before we could get any more details, including his name. What do you remember?”
“I was riding from Tallega to Neceda when somebody slipped up behind me and whacked me on the back of the head. Next thing I knew, I woke up here.”
He nodded. “And who was the girl?”
I don’t know why, but I decided to play dumb. “Girl?”
“The dead girl that was brought in with you. She’d been beaten up pretty badly. Or pretty well, depending on whose side you’re on. The gals here told me when they looked her over that at least three of her injuries could’ve been the fatal one.”
I shook my head slightly. “Not a clue.”
“It’s not the first time he’s been coldcocked,” Liz offered. “They said those things add up, and he might have some memory loss.”
“Hm. The convenient kind, I suspect,” Gary said. “But there’s no rush. If it’s bandits, they’ll do it again to somebody else and we’ll hear about it. If it’s personal, you will. If you think of anything you want to add, let me know.”
“That’s your whole investigation?” I said wryly.
He shrugged. “No point in leveling my lance if there’s no one to joust with. Give me a name or a description, I’ll get on it. Otherwise . . .” He shrugged.
Gary left, and I watched out the door until he was far down the hallway. He stopped and chatted with a pair of apprentices in their striped robes, and left them giggling. When he finally turned the corner and was out of sight, Liz sat on the edge of the bed and took my hand. “Want to tell me about the girl?” she asked quietly, her face neutral.
“I picked her up on the road. She’d been beaten up and needed a ride into town. I thought she’d been smacked around by some drunken husband or father. Turned out I was wrong.”
“Did you get her name?”
“Laura Lesperitt.” I looked up and managed a smile. “And that’s all I got from her.”
Liz’s eyes narrowed playfully. “Well, let that be a lesson to you about seeing other women behind my back, Eddie LaCrosse.” Then she kissed me.
THE next day I left the hospital. My ribs had pretty much healed, and the huge bandage around my head had diminished to a single circlet mainly protecting the thick scab under my hair. Mother Bennings said it could go, too, whenever I felt like it. My head still hurt and my side ached, but I could rest at home just as well. Besides, those blank white walls were starting to get to me.
My belongings, including my Jackblade KG-model sword, were returned to me when we checked out. So the guy with the dragon boots hadn’t kept it; he meant for my death to look like an accident, as if I’d simply ridden off the cliff in the darkness. I checked it over, including the stiletto hidden in the hilt, but it was undamaged and had not been sabotaged. I did not buckle the scabbard around my waist; it had done me no good at all the last time I’d worn it.
Down the hill from the hospital squatted Neceda, happily going along without me. It was a small village on the Gusay River, a crossroads town where people stopped on their way to and from other places. The town’s actual population was small, but at any given moment hundreds of strangers roamed its streets, drank in its taverns, fornicated in its whorehouses or languished in its jail. And for now and the foreseeable future, it was home. The people who wanted my services appreciated the fact that my office wasn’t in a big, gossipy city where their friends or enemies might spot them talking to me.
Liz may have looked slender and shapely—which she was—but she was also ox strong, and came awfully close to carrying me a few times as I hobbled out to her waiting wagon. I was stiff, thick with too much rest and blinded by the fresh sunlight. Every bump in the road sent jolts through me, so she kept us at a crawl.
I scanned people’s feet as we rode through town, especially those of men lounging against walls, standing in doorways or doing any of the other things people do when they’re trying to fake being casual. I saw no dragon boots. One guy caught me checking out his feet and glared at me, then took in the bandage around my head. His expression changed to one of annoyance mixed with pity.
As the wagon rolled through town, I glanced down one of the side streets and managed a weak double take. A group of men and women unloaded furniture and other items from three over-stuffed wagons. Two things were odd about this: the building they were moving all this into had been a popular whorehouse called the Lizard’s Kiss before I’d been hurt, and the people all wore matching red head scarves. They also had the same general physical look: squat and thick bodied, with coarse features set in what looked, at this distance, like a perpetual scowl.
“What’s all that?” I asked Liz.
“What?” she said, looking around.
“Back at the Lizard’s Kiss. Looked like they were redecorating.”
“Oh. That closed down. Joan, the owner, sent the girls packing and lit out for somewhere else.”
“Why?” It seemed odd because Joan had been thoroughly well connected to the powers that be in Neceda, something that took a while to establish and was not lightly thrown away.
Liz shrugged. “Don’t know. Might ask Gary.”
“Yeah,” I said. A whorehouse shutting down wasn’t that unusual, but something about those red-scarved people stuck in my mind. Nothing shook immediately loose, so I pushed it aside for more immediate concerns. “Go by the tavern.”
“What?” Liz said.
“The tavern. I want to check in at my office.”
She did as I asked. Even though it was not yet noon, a half-dozen horses were tied on the street outside Angelina’s establishment. The building was low and broad in the front, with a second-story attic in the back built directly over the kitchen. The main doors opened as we stopped, and a tall man with a scarred face wobbled out, squinting into the light. He froze when he saw us, his expression a mix of shame and surprise. I had no idea who he was, and after a moment his red-rimmed eyes adjusted and he realized he didn’t know me, either. He stumbled off with a mumbled apology, his conscience apparently so guilty over something that even being blind drunk in the middle of the day couldn’t quiet it. I checked his boots; dragon free.
“Just wait here; I’ll go get her,” Liz said.
“Uh-uh,” I said, and swung one heavy leg over the side of the wagon. “I’ll never live it down if I don’t walk in with my chin high.”
“That’s silly.”
“So is calling something a ‘sharp curve,’ but we still do it.”
We walked in with Liz’s arm around my waist, surreptitiously supporting me. Angelina came out from behind the counter and, without a word, put her arms around both our necks. It hurt when she squeezed, but I said nothing. My hand covered Liz’s on Angelina’s back. If I had a family anymore, these two women were it: lover/partner and sister/confessor.
Angelina pulled away and scowled at me. “Hit him in the head, huh?”
“No doubt there’s a mace with a serious dent in it somewhere,” Liz said.
Angelina shook her head. She was middle-aged b
ut still handsome, with a form that in its day must’ve inspired plenty of young men to acts of passion or violence. She was well educated, road smart and honest, and could’ve done much better for herself than owning a tavern in Neceda. But I never asked any questions, and she never offered any hints about who or what she was hiding from.
Angelina returned to her spot behind the bar and said, “Callie will be sorry she missed you.”
Callie was Angelina’s favorite barmaid, a sweet teenage girl with the figure of a goddess and the smarts of a horseshoe. “Where is she?” Liz asked.
“She fell in love. Ran off with some traveling conjurer. I figure she’ll be back any day now . . .”—she patted her stomach—“. . . hopefully without a surprise in the works.”
“Teenage girls never know what’s good for them,” I agreed as I lowered myself onto a stool at the bar. Liz took the one beside me. The big square room had booths along the walls, four wobbly tables and a clear space for musicians and dancing. The wall behind the bar hid the kitchen, although the heat and odor of whatever was cooking always filled the place. There were no windows, so except for the table lamps it stayed perpetually dark, which suited the clientele.
“There’s folks asking about you,” Angelina said as she put two fresh tankards in front of us.
“Clients?” I asked.
“I’m afraid not, Mr. LaCrosse,” a new voice said.
I turned as much as my stiff body allowed. A tall, well-groomed man stood beside me. He wore a cloak, and the tunic beneath it bore the royal seal of Muscodia. The insignia told me he was a captain, an awfully high rank for one so young: he couldn’t have been more than twenty. His cleanliness told me he took himself and his position very seriously. His eyes told me I should, too.
The well-groomed young man said, “Daniel Argoset, King’s Special Office of Domestic Security.” He offered his hand, and I shook it. His grip was firm.
“Does your father know you stole his uniform?” I asked; I’d seen stable boys who looked older.
