by Alex Bledsoe
I grabbed the nearest backwoods guy, slammed him into the wall and punched him hard in the chest. Completely surprised, he collapsed with a ragged gasp as he tried to catch his breath. The others, frozen and speechless, stared at me.
“Doug Candora was here a little while ago,” I said, my own breathing heavy from running. “Where’s the girl he came to see?”
They continued to stare. I punched the other hill dweller in his dull-eyed face, and he fell backward onto the pillows. The minstrels dropped their pipe and scrambled back against the wall, huddling like the women.
I glared at the musicians. “Okay, now I’m going to start beating on you two until one of you answers me. That means one of you will take a beating for nothing.”
“Hey, man, we just work here,” Tony said. His voice was high and jittery.
I grabbed the front of his clothes and yanked him to his feet. He was the kind of handsome that hid all his personality flaws; I wanted to punch him on general principles. “Thanks for volunteering. I’ll start with you.”
“Up the stairs,” one of the women said in a small, sheepish voice. Her expression was young and weary, the face of someone with little hope and fewer choices. “Top floor. The last room on the left. He took her up; she hasn’t come down.”
The woman beside her, older and more scorpionish, glared her disapproval but said nothing. Both pulled their red cloaks tight around them and huddled together as if they could blend in with the pillows.
“I’m going to take the girl upstairs out of here,” I said to the sad-faced one. “Do you want to come, too?”
She looked down and shook her head. Scorpion woman smiled up at me, vicious and triumphant. I didn’t have time to argue. The first guy I’d punched got to his knees, still wheezing, but when he saw me he fell back down.
I took the steps two at a time. No one else seemed to be around, and the only light came from sconces on the landings. I found the indicated door and kicked it open. My hip would thank me for all this in the morning.
The room was pitch-black. All the windows were blocked, and the only light came from the feeble candle outside in the hall. I took it from its holder and stepped cautiously through the door.
There was little to hide someone: a narrow single bed, a chamber pot, a small closet with its door open. A man’s dusty trail clothes hung in it. In its previous incarnation, this room would’ve been tapestried, filled with flower petals floating in bowls and lit by scented candles. Now it was a utilitarian cloister.
The bed was disheveled, and I spotted unmistakable dark droplets along the sheets. When I moved the pillow, I found a smear of blood, still warm and just starting to dry. Candora must’ve come straight to Angelina’s from here.
My heart wanted to jump out through my throat and search the room for itself. I made it stay put and called out, “Nicky? It’s Eddie.” There was no response. I was about to leave when the obvious finally occurred to me and I looked under the bed.
If candlelight hadn’t gleamed off her eyes I might not have noticed her curled up in a tight ball. She was still wrapped in the dark red robe, and it made her almost invisible in the shadowy space. I reached out my hand toward her. “Nicky, come on out; it’s me.”
She said nothing, and for a heart-stopping moment I thought she was dead, but then her bare feet shifted as she tried to make herself even smaller.
“Nicky, it’s Eddie. I’m here to get you away.”
She did not move, and made a sound like a kitten.
“All right, hang on,” I said. I put the candle on the floor, took hold of the edge of the bed frame and lifted. It was magnificently heavy, and I felt its weight in my lower spine and knees. I got it tilted enough to squirm under and brace it with my back, and that allowed me to reach Nicky. I touched her bare ankle.
She screamed and exploded out of the cloak like a trapped animal. She drove us both out into the open, and the bed hit the floor with a sound like a thunderclap. The candle fell over and began to roll, filling the room with disorienting shadows. She was all clawing nails and kicking feet, but she was smaller than me and I finally got my arms around her, pinned her to the floor and used my weight to hold her there. “Nicky, it’s Eddie; calm the hell down!”
I retrieved the candle, miraculously still burning, and held it so I could see her face. Her eyes were wide, and her pupils almost covered the irises. Dried blood stained her lips, and a nasty bruise was forming on her left forehead. She again made a noise like a kitten. Saliva dripped from her mouth, and I smelled a rank, sickly-sweet odor on her breath. She’d been poisoned.
“Nicky, can you hear me?” I said, loud and distinct. “Do you know what he gave you?”
She went limp beneath me. I waited to see if it was a trick, but evidently her sense of the world around her no longer included me or anything else real. I didn’t know what poison Candora had used, but I had to act fast to save her, whatever it was. I wrapped her in her cloak and carried her out onto the stairs.
When I hit the second floor landing, three men came up the stairs toward me. We all stopped in mid-step. Two were wide-eyed rich pilgrims who’d arrived with Tempcott, while the third was one of Marantz’s pros. He drew his knife and said, “Put the girl down.”
I was two stairs above him, so I easily kicked the knife from his hand. It clattered down the stairs to the first floor. In the same motion I threw Nicky over my left shoulder and grabbed one of the younger men by the front of his tunic. I shoved him back down the stairs ahead of me, and followed quickly as he took his pal and Marantz’s guy tumbling with him.
There was no room for my sword, and I didn’t want to stop long enough to get the dragon-embossed knife from my boot. At the bottom of the stairs I stomped on the pro’s head as he tried to rise, slamming it into the floor and hopefully taking him out of the game. I was ten feet from reaching the front door when the two backwoods toughs I’d smacked around in the lounge suddenly blocked my path.
Both held wicked-looking, crude knives that would do more damage coming out than they did going in. “You goin’ nowhere,” one of them growled.
I heard outraged voices on the stairs behind me as other pilgrims emerged from their rooms. He might be right.
At that moment a door beside me opened and out stumbled Prince Frederick, his scarf ridiculously askew. He was barefoot and shirtless, and past him I saw a bored-looking girl on his narrow bed. Yawning, he stepped right between me and the bad guys and said woozily, “Hey, guys, what’s with all the slamming and stomping around?”
I never question luck. I grabbed him around the neck and yanked him against me as a shield. I clutched his throat hard enough for him to know I could easily crush his windpipe. Suddenly he was wide awake and completely sober.
“Hey, do you know who I—,” he started to say.
“Not another word,” I snarled. He nodded quickly.
More of the hill people emerged from the sitting room. Guess they didn’t get the fancy rooms upstairs and probably made do with a common area in the back. They filed in behind their brethren; that ten feet to the door was getting longer every minute.
“Any of you toads so much as blinks wrong, and Tempcott’ll need a new walking gold bag,” I said as I shoved the prince forward. He was slight and girlish, his bare torso no more muscled than a ten-year-old’s. He offered no resistance, but merely whimpered and raised his hands as if I held a crossbow to his back. The others stepped aside, grudgingly letting us pass. Any of them could’ve leaped forward and knifed me, but I counted on them knowing how important Frederick was to their leader.
“Open the door!” I snapped. One of the other rich boys hurried to obey. Nicky’s weight made my shoulder ache, and Frederick sweated so much my grip on his throat was beginning to slip. I turned as I went through the door, keeping the bad guys in front of me as I backed out.
And of course, because I’m a total fatalist, I wasn’t at all surprised when a voice behind me, from the porch, said, “Well, this sure l
ooks interesting.”
chapter
EIGHTEEN
I
don’t have time to banter,” I said. “Who are you and whose side are you on here?”
I heard a thump as the interloper slid down off the porch rail, then the soft shwip as he drew my sword from its scabbard. Just when I was sure I’d feel my own blade at my throat, the voice said wearily, “I suppose I’m on yours.”
I risked a glance, and was more surprised than ever: it was the damn scribe again. He stepped in front of me and faced the doorway full of dragon worshippers. “Okay, listen,” he told them. “I’m really not very good in a fight, so I’ll probably get this sword stuck in the first guy I stab. The rest of you can take me down pretty easy then, but the question is . . . who’s going to be that first guy?”
No one moved. The scribe mock feinted with the sword, and the others jumped back. He laughed. He had his thumb on the safety catch; he wasn’t as much an amateur as he pretended. “You taking the prince, too?” he asked me.
“I’d just as soon not,” I said.
The scribe grabbed Frederick by the hair and shoved him through the door back into the house. Then he yanked the door shut. He turned to me and said, “What’s wrong with her?”
“Poisoned,” I said.
“My horse is in the street; take her to the moon goddess hospital outside town. I’ll make sure no one follows and then meet you there.” He swung the sword casually. “Wow, a Shadow Slasher III. Nice balance, too, although I always thought they were top-heavy.”
I had no time to argue or try to fathom his true intentions. As he said, his horse—a majestic chocolate-colored stallion—waited patiently in the street, and did not balk when I took the reins, tossed Nicky’s limp body over his back and leaped into the saddle. He took off with only the slightest nudge from my heels, and people jumped aside as we shot through town.
I repeatedly kicked the door of the main hospital building to get their attention, but not hard enough to break it open. Two heavy doors in one night was all I had in me. Nicky moaned softly, limp in my arms. “Hey! Emergency here!”
The door opened and a kindly gray-haired woman wrapped in a robe held up a lamp. She saw Nicky’s pale, sweaty face and immediately stepped aside. “First room to your left,” she said. “Put her on the table.”
One of the apprentices, a young woman clad in a thin sleeping gown, appeared rubbing her eyes. “What’s wrong?”
“This girl’s been poisoned,” the older woman said. “Get water heated for a bath. Put sea salt and draw-weed in it.”
The apprentice understood the urgency and scurried to obey. The older woman followed me into the small examination room, opened the red robe and scowled at Nicky’s skimpy loincloth. “Did you buy her for the evening and things got out of hand?” she snapped at me.
“No,” I said. “She’s not a whore; she’s just a girl who got in over her head and fought back.”
She looked at me oddly. “Mr. LaCrosse?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t recognize you without the bandage around your head. You should reconsider whoever gave you that haircut, though. Here, make yourself useful and light the other lamps.” As I followed orders, she lifted the girl’s eyelids, sniffed at her shallow breath and checked her pulse at her throat. Exposed this way, askew and covered in unhealthy sweat, Nicky looked even more helpless, as Laura Lesperitt must’ve looked to Doug Candora. He hadn’t hesitated then, either.
“We never officially met, but I’m Mother Mallory,” the woman said. “I assisted Mother Bennings on your case, goddess keep her soul. So who is this?”
“Her name’s Nicky, and that’s really all I know about her.”
“Well, we’ll do what we can,” she said, and turned away from me. I was being dismissed.
I cleared my throat. “I’m not leaving,” I said with certainty.
“You can’t help.”
“I’ll try to stay out of the way.”
She started to protest again, then nodded. “Pick her up and follow me, then.”
We went into the next room, where the apprentice had a large tub filled with water above a low-burning fire. Mother Mallory removed the skimpy loincloth and I placed Nicky, now totally nude, in the bath. The water was already hot. She looked like a deathly ill child, small and pitiful. Her eyelids fluttered and she tried to speak, but made no coherent sound.
“Keep the fire going at this level,” Mother Mallory said to the apprentice. I understood the treatment; if Nicky could sweat out enough of the poison, she might survive it, although it could still do permanent damage. If I’d gotten her here sooner, or known what the poison actually was, an antidote might’ve been provided. Under the circumstances, though, this was her only real chance.
“There’s nothing to do but wait,” Mother Mallory said sadly. “I suspect, from the smell, that she was given an extract of six-devil tea, but I can’t be sure. And if it was more than fifteen or twenty minutes ago, the standard antidote would have no effect.” She tenderly stroked Nicky’s tangled hair. “It all depends now on how large a dose she ingested, and how strong she is.”
The apprentice, her nightgown clinging translucently to her sweaty form, returned with two stools. “If you’re going to wait,” she said to me, “you might as well sit down.”
I took off my jacket and unbuckled my empty scabbard. I placed the stool in the corner where I could see Nicky’s face and settled back into the notch of the two walls. I yawned and closed my eyes for just a moment.
I snapped awake when a hand shook me. “Hey.”
The scribe looked down at me. He had a kindly, easy smile and eyes that were clear and sharp. The tight curls at his temples were white. He was at least my age, maybe older, and radiated a calm, seen-it-all demeanor. The other scribes I’d met over the years had a scholarly, chilly air befitting their isolation from the world’s concerns. This one seemed more grounded. “Sorry. Hate to wake you up, but we need to talk.”
I looked around. I couldn’t have been out long; Mother Mallory still sat beside the tub, and Nicky hadn’t moved, although the apprentice had changed into a less revealing tunic. The room’s air was hazy and smelled sickly-sweet, the same odor I’d caught on Nicky’s breath. I knew nothing about six-devil tea extract; I wondered if it was toxic in steam, too. I stood, wincing at the door-kicking ache in my leg and hip, and yawned.
“We’ll be out in the courtyard,” the scribe said. Mother Mallory nodded. I followed him outside, where the summer night air felt cool and dry compared to the sickroom.
“Come on; let’s have a smoke and exchange stories,” he said, and led me into a courtyard. Neat patches of herbs and flowers showed in the moonlight. The windows of all the other patient rooms were dark.
He reached into the shadowy space beneath a stone bench and withdrew my sword. “No one from the house showed their noses after you left. I stayed and watched until people started yelling inside.”
“I bet they did,” I said. Marantz and the others would have returned through the tunnel.
He handed me my sword. “The girl that important?”
“No,” I sighed, suddenly bone tired. My scabbard was still inside, so I leaned the sword against the nearest wall. “Just that the people who hurt her hate being embarrassed by things like me taking her out the front door.”
“Your daughter?”
I shook my head. “Just a friend.”
“Name’s Harry Lockett, by the way,” the scribe said, offering his hand.
“Eddie LaCrosse.” His grip was strong. The scribes I’d met in the past had weak grips, betraying their fear that they might injure their writing hand.
He caught my reaction. “I didn’t come up through the scribe academy,” he said with a laugh. “It was more of a mid-life career change. That’s why I don’t shake hands like a six-year-old girl.”
“And why you know where the safety is on a Shadow Slasher III.”
He laughed. “I’m more
interested in what you know, Mr. LaCrosse. Like why Prince Frederick of Muscodia is living in an old whorehouse in Neceda.”
I shrugged. “I was as surprised as you. I suppose he’s a dragon worshipper, like the rest of them.”
“Then it makes some sort of sense,” he said seriously.
“It does?”
“Sure. You know anything about the history of this area?”
“No. I’m not from here.”
In a stentorian voice he proclaimed, “Long before men came to what we now call Muscodia, this whole area was the domain of the dragon.” This was how scribes recited their stories in royal courts, and even now it made me stand up straight, like I was a little boy back in the throne room with my father.
A window opened somewhere and a sleepy female voice said, “Shut up!”
Lockett grinned. “I know, hard to believe, but it’s true,” he said in a normal voice. “Ever wonder how the Black River Hills got their name?”
“From the Black River?”
He mock sighed in annoyance and began packing a pipe with dark, serrated leaves. “Okay, okay. How did the river get its name?”
“I heard because it’s so deep in places the water looks black.”
“No. There were originally two names, the Black Hills and the Black River. They got combined over time, and their origins were lost. Both came from a time when the river and the hills were black with accumulated ash.”
“From dragons breathing fire?”
He grinned. “Now you’re catching on.” He held the pipe in his teeth, struck a flint over it and sucked until the flame caught. “Want to hear the story?”
I looked back at the door to the hospital. I could do nothing for Nicky; going after Candora right now certainly would not help her. I really wanted to talk to Liz, but that thought sent warning hackles up my back. I felt adrift. So I said, “Sure.”
