The Warden, page 15
She did not expect him to turn toward her with a nightmare of a grimace, vault the bed, and raise his clubs.
She threw up a ward and knocked his blows aside without feeling them. Her first instinct was to draw her Abjurer’s sword and bury it in his stomach, and she would’ve been well within her rights.
Aelis did draw her sword, to focus her wards through it. Luth’s attacks had no subtlety and no plan; he was hammering away at the ward that shimmered in front of her as though it were a shield on an enemy’s arm.
Convincing him that he hadn’t slept was not going to work on the heels of having slept all day. She could hold the ward he battered for some time, but not indefinitely. Like a man crazed, he didn’t even bother to shift his attacks, wildly swinging his broken chair legs at her nearly invisible shield. His eyes were wide and shot with red, and the sides of his mouth were flecked with foam.
Aelis glanced at his smooth, burned skin, and a new Enchantment occurred to her. She called it to her mind as she withstood a few more blows. It was a Second Order Enchantment, and she couldn’t hold the ward and cast it at the same time. She bent low beneath her ward, drove the pommel of her sword into his stomach—aiming for that same handy cluster of nerves that had laid Elmo low—and stepped away as he clutched and gasped for breath.
Then she released her spell, and Luth screamed in a kind of liquid agony. He dropped his clubs and began flailing his arms, dropped to the floor, and rolled back and forth upon it.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered, as she stepped forward and brought her pommel down on his forehead. Mercifully, he stopped screaming and lay still on the wooden floor, though his breath wheezed and whistled in his chest and he let out a soft moan.
Timmuk and Maurenia were a babble of questions, as was Andresh, though she couldn’t understand a word he rumbled.
She held up a hand to silence them and immediately bent to Luth’s side. She felt for his pulse, which was fast, but not dangerously so. Then her hands moved to the waistband of the short trousers that were all the clothing he wore, and she felt carefully along it, fingers moving slowly and questioningly along his waist.
“What did you do to him?” Maurenia finally asked through clenched teeth.
“And what do you think you’re doing now?” Timmuk grated.
“Embarran’s Memento,” Aelis answered. “I recalled to his mind an experience he’d had.”
“His burns,” Maurenia said. “You made him relive them. The agony of it.”
Aelis was a bit stunned at the speed at which the half-elf had guessed, but not at the anger in her voice. She wanted to jump up and explain. It did him no lasting harm, and it was brief, and it was the best way I could think of to stop him without killing him, which I didn’t much want to do, but she’d already found what she was looking for.
Luth, it appeared, had worn a coin belt under his trousers, just against his skin. It was a simple length of cloth, really, twisted and then knotted to keep coins securely and secretly upon one’s person. She cut it free with the edge of her sword and lifted it out, yanked a bit of shiny orange gold from one of the pockets formed by the twisted knots.
“Here’s the answer,” Aelis said, holding it aloft. “There must be ten, twelve pieces of gold folded into this.” By now, Aelis realized, Rus, Martin, and Dashia had all gathered outside the door, and likely had seen most of what had happened. She dumped the gold onto the only table the room had remaining. All the gold was of a kind with those she’d been collecting. She began sweeping it into her pouch. “And he’d been wearing it against his skin for days on end.” She turned her head to Timmuk. “Had he been acting strangely?”
“Luth was always a strange one,” the dwarf answered, and Aelis could read the evasion in his side-shifting eyes and twisting mouth. “But…” He sighed. “He was faster to pick a quarrel, for sure.”
“When he challenged you in front of the entire village that’d turned out to see us,” Darent said, his voice a hoarse croak, “that wasn’t much like him. He’s an odd one, with a prickly kind of honor. Not much of a braggart.”
Dashia came to Luth’s side and knelt by him, taking his scarred arm in her own. She looked to Andresh and murmured something in Dwarfish. Darent and the dwarf both rushed to help her pick him up—no easy feat—and slide him onto the bed.
“I don’t know if I’d say he wasn’t a braggart,” Maurenia put in. “But he’s the kind would be more likely to want to impress a village full of peasants. Not frighten them.”
“Check his boots,” Aelis said, “and his pockets, and all his gear. If he’s got more of this gold secreted around himself, I need it.” Briefly, she let her eyes close, and a wave of weariness hit her. One way or another she was going to get some sleep. Soon.
“Rus,” she said, “have you a spare room? I…” She stopped as she almost said I can’t make it back to the tower just now but didn’t want to admit that kind of weakness. “I ought to stay in the village, close to hand, if I could.”
“We do,” Rus said, cracking a yawn. “But it’s the one you just bought the bed out of. It’ll have to be blankets on the floor.”
“It’ll do,” Aelis said. She forced her eyes open, blinked encroaching sleep away, and made for the door. She felt eyes on her as she moved away, following a sleepy Rus and Martin to another room down the hall.
Inside there was a great empty spot where a bed would’ve been, a clean grate across a fireplace with no fire behind it, a small table, and two stools. She fell heavily onto a stool, setting her still naked sword on the table and following it with the bag of gold.
While she waited for the innkeepers to gather spare blankets from the linen cupboard, she considered the gold.
“Who made you?” she muttered. “And why? To what end? And why did you have to come here to this village?”
“Should I be worried, you talking to a bag of gold? A bag of that gold? Am I going to have to duel you to take it away?” Maurenia, her footsteps all but silent even on the wooden floor of the inn, came into the room and took the other stool.
Aelis unbuckled her swordbelt and slipped her blade into its scabbard. Maurenia leaned forward, smiling very oddly.
“Not answering my question, but taking your belt off; it’s clear you don’t want to talk to me, but just what do you want to do, Aelis?” The half-elf had leaned forward across the table until her face was only a scant few inches away, a lock of hair falling over one eye.
Rus had lit candles from the stick he’d carried when he came running to her confrontation with Luth. Between that and the dawn that was breaking outside, it was well lit. Too well lit for Aelis to hide the flush that immediately hit her cheeks or the way her breath caught when she looked up and found Maurenia’s face so close to her own.
“I wasn’t talking to the gold so much as … whatever malevolence it represents,” she muttered in answer.
“And what about my second question?”
Aelis was unable to summon an answer to that. Maurenia’s lips opened faintly and she brushed her hair back behind her slender, slightly pointed ears. The skin of Aelis’s cheeks burned. She was suddenly aware of how close their hands were upon the table.
Rus coughed politely at the door, and Aelis popped up as though she were a child caught at mischief. Maurenia chuckled throatily and stood, but slowly, languidly almost. Rus and Martin, silent, began building a pile of blankets on the floor. They’d found a spare mattress ticking that had some hay filling it—though not enough to make it a proper bed—and laid it flat upon the floorboards. With blankets piled about it, it still looked as depressing a bed as Aelis had ever occupied.
Nevertheless, she was ready to fall in it the moment they filed silently out.
Almost.
She turned back to Maurenia, who looked at the bedding and sighed. “I’d point out that with Dashia attending to Luth, I have a room to myself for the next few hours. But I won’t, because I think you don’t know how you want to answer that invitation.” She held up a slender, graceful hand. “You do not need to try. But … should you come to any understanding before we depart Lone Pine…” Maurenia shrugged and smiled, and Aelis remained rooted to the spot, the burn on her skin moving down her neck to her chest and radiating down her arms and back.
“Good night, Warden,” the half-elf said, then turned and left. Her steps were slow and deliberate, but confident.
Aelis had her boots off and fell into the bedding, letting out a small, frustrated sound, only moments after Maurenia had closed the door.
Almost immediately, she drifted off to sleep.
11
THE KNIFE
Aelis’s dreams were a muddle of flashing orange-tinted gold, of Maurenia’s mouth and eyes and hair, of a shadowy figure flinging orbs of spidery lightning at her. They landed with fiery impact and buffeted her about as she strove to recall the name of the tall and spindly shadow that hurled them.
She dreamed of a trio of menacing figures in robes and the gold lying on a stone table before them.
When she woke, she was sweating, slanting light filtered through the shutters on the window, and her back was as stiff as the floorboards that she felt all too keenly beneath the inadequate mattress.
Doesn’t seem to be anything for it but to get up, she told herself. Rather lie here and revisit some of those dreams, she thought in reply, but she rolled to her knees and palms and pushed herself up with a groan. She went for her swordbelt and the purse on the table and settled them both about her waist again, and tried to sort out her feelings about Maurenia.
“That,” she muttered, “is not something I’m going to figure out without breakfast. Or wine.” She dragged her fingers through her knotted hair and wished for a washstand, combs, and a change of clothes.
When none of those appeared, she threw open the door and headed downstairs. The entire company of the Thorns were assembled and occupying a table to themselves; a few village folk sat at others. The smells of woodsmoke and baking bread were omnipresent, and her stomach rumbled.
The adventurers seemed to be keeping their own counsel. All of them looked to her as she appeared at the top of the stairs, though Luth immediately looked away. Maurenia’s gaze lingered, and Aelis met it for only a moment before seeking out breakfast.
Rus had a tray ready for her: bread, butter, goat cheese, a mug of small beer. He set it down as she settled at the counter.
“Otto was already in to look for you,” he said, standing back while she immediately tucked into the bread.
“How’d he know I was here?”
“Well, he came here first to ask how he ought to ask at your tower. He didn’t say it was any kind of emergency.”
Aelis eschewed the knife that was set on her tray, preferring instead to drag chunks of bread through the warm butter and the soft cheese, speckling them with crumbs as she did.
“What did he want?”
“Elmo hadn’t come back. Said he was wondering if there was aught you could do to help find him.”
Aelis sighed. “I’m neither a tracker nor a Diviner. There’s not much I can do for him till someone else finds him.” Motion from the table where the Thorns sat caught her eye. She saw Maurenia beginning to stand up from the bench, only to hear Timmuk mutter something she couldn’t catch—that she suspected were words in Dwarfish she’d not have understood in any case—and the half-elf sat back down without argument.
She took a moment to study the adventurers; they wore their black leathers, their weapons. Rus, still standing behind the counter, saw the direction of her glance.
“They’ve already fed and saddled their horses, rolled the wagon out, and greased its wheels. I think you’ll find them gone before too long.”
“I’m sure Lone Pine won’t be sad to see them gone,” Aelis muttered in reply, before hastily gulping down the rest of her breakfast. Rus went back to his work in the back with a shrug.
The last thing Aelis wanted to do was trudge out to that depressing shack the brothers shared and try and squeeze more information out of Otto. What she wanted was to have a talk with Maurenia, contrive some kind of bath, go back to her tower, change her clothes, and spend some time sorting out all of her many confusions with pen, ink, and paper. This seemed to her the best possible way for the day to unfold.
She thought for a moment on what Bardun Jacques would have to say to a Warden who was more concerned with their comforts than the needs of the people under their charge. She sighed, finished her bread and cheese, had a long look at the sour, cloudy beer and left it sitting in the mug as she stood.
Aelis was nearly at the door when she heard Timmuk clear his throat.
“Warden,” he began, swinging his legs over the edge of the bench, “if you’d be so kind as to clear up the matter of—”
“I have no time to draw up any documents or read any that you’ve already done, Timmuk,” she answered, a little more curtly than she’d meant to.
“Now, it’s not a matter that can be left hanging.” The dwarf edged a few steps closer to her. None of the other Thorns, save Maurenia, looked up from the surface of the table. “We’re to be moving on.”
“If you want to leave before I return, then you’ll do it without any letters to any bankers in my name,” Aelis snapped. “I’ve got people to attend to.” The combination of poor sleep, simple food, and bad drink was doing her nerves no good, Aelis knew. The best course of action would be to absent herself from the conversation, so she pushed open the door.
“That really won’t do, Warden,” Timmuk called after her, his tone incongruously obsequious. “Promises were made. I’m going to have to insist.”
Aelis whirled back into the room, her hand falling to the hilt of her sword, her eyes flashing. “The only one of us with any right to insist on any gods-damned thing, Timmuk Dobrusz, is me. Your payment is neither my priority nor my problem. The assault a member of your company has twice made upon me will become both if you say another fucking word. I will begin by arresting you and seizing your property in order to pay back damages to the people of the village, and that’s before I decide if I put you to an inquest for multiple crimes.”
Whether he was merely surprised or genuinely frightened, Aelis wasn’t sure. But the dwarf at least took a half step away from her before raising a hand and opening his mouth.
“Do not doubt me, dwarf,” Aelis said, drawing the words out slowly, carefully, like a blade slipped from a sheath.
In the resulting silence, she made her exit and walked hastily toward Otto and Elmo’s cottage, blinking at the morning sun. Her anger at the dwarf’s impertinence was such that she ate up the ground, ignored her surroundings, and didn’t once look back to see if anyone was following her.
By the time she reached the brothers’ rickety farmstead, a light breeze had kicked up, and the door was banging against the frame. Aelis sighed as she considered the life they and Pips must lead. How does it even keep the weather out, she wondered as she watched the door slam against the wall. In the winter they must bring their animals inside—do peasants actually do that or is that some silly assumption? It must reek, if so, she thought, lost in her rumination, imagining the strong scent of goat or sheep in close quarters, the place filling up with woodsmoke, the scent of blood.
She stopped in midthought as she realized that she’d thought of the scent of blood because she smelled it, brought by that gusting wind through that banging door. It was a scent all Necromancers came to know.
Aelis was through the door before she even knew what she was doing. Otto lay on the dirt floor on his back, the hilt of a knife jutting up from his stomach, blood turning his shirt to a ruin. She resisted the urge to kneel at his side and immediately see to the wound, instead quickly glancing around, her sword half out of her sheath. There weren’t many places in the mean little hut for anyone to hide, so she quickly knelt, putting her hands to Otto’s neck. He was breathing; that much she could hear, the little pained wheezes forcing themselves out of his slack mouth like a bellows in need of replacing.
Blood didn’t flow freely from the wound, but he’d lost enough to worry her, and she could feel it hot and thick on her hands as she put them to the wound. She measured the hilt with her eyes, trying to gauge the length of the knife blade given what she could see.
“Not more than six inches, surely,” she told herself with a confidence she didn’t feel. “Otto!” She put some snap into her voice when she said his name, trying to draw his attention. His eyelids fluttered, and perhaps he moaned a bit louder, but no words came.
Aelis was already scanning the room for what she could use to treat the wound. Pressure. Binding. Delving.
With a grimace, she reached with her right hand to her left shoulder, where her sleeve met the shoulder of her robe. She dug in her nails and tore, ripping the stitches out a few at a time, shaking her Enchanter’s wand free and letting it clatter to the floor as her left sleeve came loose. Then she did the same to her other sleeve.
With her left hand, she drew her Anatomist’s Dagger from the back of her belt, and placed the right hand, palm down and fingers flat and extended, on Otto’s blood-smeared stomach.
She focused her senses on the dagger, and then through it, toward Otto’s body. In her mind’s eye it was a heavy prism in her hand through which the body of the wounded man before her was reflected and refracted into a panoply of colors and textures. A pulsing dark red that seemed to weaken and wane as moments passed indicated not merely the flow of his blood but the vital force of life that sustained him. Blues, yellows, greens that she hadn’t time to sort through and look upon individually indicated specific organs. His mind, his consciousness, his brain was merely a dull gray. And worst of all was the seepage of black into other parts of the prism.
The blade was longer than she’d feared, it had pierced his innards, and devastating consequences would follow soon; infection, rot, disease in his organs, a slow death as his body poisoned itself.
