She wasn’t done with him yet.
Danica’s foot snapped out wide, coming back around the man’s head and forcing his chin over the prow rail. Holding him tightly against the wood, Danica yanked his arm back out over the water. She locked his elbow so that he couldn’t bend the limb and pressed straight down.
The man’s eyes bulged as the bow pressed his throat up under his jaw.
Cadderly’s off-balance throw soared lower than he’d hoped, but while he didn’t get the man’s head, he did get a few fingers—and the top plank of the boat. Wood splintered, the remaining oar flew off, and so did the assassin, clutching his blasted belly as he fell away into the lake.
Free of the weight, the boat rocked back so far that Cadderly feared its other side would dip under the water where the knife-thrower waited.
The young priest realized how vulnerable he was, and how vulnerable Danica was. They needed a distraction, something to allow them to get their bearings.
Water did come in over the broken side of the boat when it rocked back again, but Cadderly took no note of it, intent on the wounded man fumbling in the water with the floating oar. The shape of the oar caught the young priest’s attention.
With one foot planted in the rocking boat, and with the choking man struggling frantically against her, Danica amazingly held her balance.
The struggling killer tried to come up over the side, but Danica jammed his arm down mightily, dislocating his shoulder.
The man couldn’t even grimace at the obvious pain. His face went blank, weirdly serene. Danica understood. She brought her foot back around, released its hold on the man’s head, and let him slip under the water.
Her sensibilities returned to her then, her sheer rage at the presence of the Night Masks temporarily sated by the reality of the kill. Danica realized for the first time that others were likely about.
She turned, and to her horror saw Cadderly disappear under the water in the grasp of a killer. Another boat, with several men in it, approached from behind. Danica didn’t know if they were friend or foe—until a crossbow quarrel cut the air beside her face.
Instinctively, she dived to the floor of the boat. She knew she had to get to Cadderly, but how? If she went under the water, how could she hope to stop the approaching menace?
A scream to the side turned Danica around to peek over the broken plank. There floundered the wounded Night Mask, the one Cadderly had hit with his spindle-disks, fighting desperately to free himself from the clutches of a long, thick snake—a constrictor about the same size as one of the boat’s oars.
The man somehow broke free and began swimming with all his might toward the approaching boat. The snake slithered off in pursuit, slipping under the water as it went.
Despite the peril, Danica couldn’t help but smile. She knew that the appearance of the snake was no natural coincidence. Cadderly, with his mysterious powers, had struck again.
Danica got up to her knees. The other boat had come closer, and she could see a man in the prow leveling a crossbow her way. She jerked up as though she meant to stand then fell flat and heard the whistle of the high-flying bolt.
That bought her the time to get over the side, into the water after Cadderly. Before she moved out of the boat, though, the water churned and the Night Mask appeared, his face contorted in terror and the second snake, the second oar, wrapped around his shoulder and chest. He reached for the boat, and slapped at the water and the beast.
Then he was gone.
Again the water churned, a short distance to the side. Up came Cadderly, impossibly fast, his body breaking out of the water too high.
He stood on the water, still wearing his hat. The holy symbol set in its front glowed furiously.
Danica nearly laughed, too amazed to react any other way. Cadderly took in a few gulps of air, seeming more surprised than Danica.
He looked back toward the approaching boat—the swimming man had just about met it by then—and saw that the crossbowman was preparing another shot.
“Get in!” Danica cried, thinking Cadderly too vulnerable standing on the water out in the open.
Cadderly seemed not to hear her. He chanted, sang actually, and waved one hand slowly to and fro.
Danica looked back to the other boat, saw the man leveling the crossbow—and saw Cadderly standing in the open, vulnerable.
She scrambled to the side, grabbed at a piece of broken wood floating in the small pool at the bottom of her boat. She came up throwing, skimming the wood sidelong so that it spun and swerved … and splashed harmlessly into the water a dozen feet to the side of the approaching craft.
But the crossbowman had flinched, had looked her way.
A sudden swell erupted in the calm lake, near where Danica’s wood had disappeared. The water reared up and rolled, as if aimed at the enemy boat. The crossbowman had set his sights on Cadderly again when the wave collided against the side of his boat. The man lurched over the side and nearly lost his weapon.
Cadderly, still standing calmly, sung his soft song and waved his hand back and forth. Another swell rose and crashed against the enemy boat, turning it around so that it faced the bridge.
Cadderly smiled, and another swell turned the boat so that it faced the shore directly away from him.
“Come,” Cadderly said to Danica, extending his hand. “Before they get their bearings.”
Danica at first misunderstood, thinking that Cadderly wanted her to help him into the boat. He resisted her pull, though, beckoning her to go to him.
The assassin who had pulled Cadderly under the water bobbed to the surface, face down. The snake that had wrapped itself around him became an oar again at Cadderly’s command and floated to the surface, a harmless piece of flotsam.
“Come,” Cadderly reiterated, tugging Danica. She jumped onto him and wrapped herself around him.
Cadderly looked around then ran for the island. Danica watched over his shoulder, taking note that his footsteps hardly disturbed the water. The young priest left depressions in the water’s surface, which quickly disappeared, as though he was running across soft ground.
Behind them, the enemy boat finally straightened and the crossbowman pulled the swimmer up over the side. The oar that had been chasing him bobbed up over the waves.
Danica kissed Cadderly on the neck and rested her weary head on his shoulder. The world had gone mad.
Cadderly came to the shore mumbling, thinking aloud. He kept chugging along but slowed under the weight of his burden when he hit more solid ground.
“Cadderly …?”
“If those are professional assassins,” he was saying, “we must assume they were hired by our enemies, by Dorigen, perhaps.”
“Cadderly …”
“Someone has made the connection to us,” Cadderly continued, undaunted. “Someone has determined that we are, or at least that I am, a threat to be eliminated.”
“Cadderly …”
“But how long have they been hovering around me?” the young priest muttered. “Oh, Brennan, I pray I’m wrong.”
“Cadderly!”
Cadderly looked right at Danica for the first time since he had stepped off the surface of the lake. “What?”
“You can put me down now,” Danica replied.
She hit the ground running, grabbing Cadderly’s wrist and tugging him along. They heard the enemy boat skid to shore through the brush behind them.
“Stubborn,” Danica said, looking over her shoulder gravely.
Cadderly knew she wanted to turn and finish the fight.
“Not now,” he begged. “We must get back to the inn.”
“We may never get our enemies so out in the open again,” Danica reasoned.
“I’m weary,” Cadderly replied. And indeed, the young priest was. The song no longer played in his head, but had been replaced by a severe headache, the likes of which young Cadderly had never before experienced.
Danica nodded and sped on. They crashed through a hedge
row into the backyard of one of Carradoon’s finer estates. Dogs began to bark from somewhere nearby, but Danica didn’t veer from her path through another hedgerow and into another open yard.
Several people, older merchants and their spouses, stared at the fleeing couple as they passed.
“Get to cover and alert the city guard!” Cadderly called to them as he followed Danica past. “Thieves and murderers pursue us! Call out the city guard and send them to the bridge!”
The couple burst through another row of bushes, coming out onto a wide, flat cobblestone lane, running between lines of beautiful manor houses, between lines of staring, curious people.
Not a horse or wagon was seen on the bridge at that early hour, something Cadderly took comfort in as he and Danica started across. The young priest would have hated to place anyone directly in the path of his deadly pursuers, and he knew by the continued bark of distant, unseen dogs that the Night Masks had not given up the chase, were only a few moments behind.
Cadderly skidded to a stop when they came to the high point in the first of the bridge’s three arching supports. Danica started to question him, but was stopped by his conniving smile.
“Watch for the assassins,” he said to her as he fell to his knees. He used his soaked cloak to trace a square on the stone of the wide bridge.
“The first page I ever looked at in Headmistress Pertelope’s book always amazed me,” he explained, not slowing in his work. “I knew it was a spell, similar to one I had seen in the book of Belisarius.”
The square completed, two lines of wetness running parallel across the structure, Cadderly rose and led Danica a few dozen steps farther along.
Cadderly called up the song and began to chant, knowing the words intimately. He had to stop, though, and rub his temples to relieve the throbbing the casting caused.
They will drain you and take a bit of you with them whenever you summon them, Pertelope had warned him. Exhaustion is your enemy …
“They’re on the bridge!” he heard Danica say, and he felt her tug at his arm, trying to hurry him along.
It could not be helped. Cadderly fought through the pain and weariness, forced the song into his mind and to his lips.
What is the bond that holds the stone?
A bond that wetness breaks.
What are you without the bond?
Danica knocked him to the ground; he barely heard the crossbow quarrel pass them by.
Still he sang, his concentration complete.
Seep, my water, seep
Through the bond, so deep.
The leading assassin stumbled suddenly, lurched forward as though his feet had been ensnared, fell face down onto the bridge … and sank into the mud that the section of bridge had become.
Danica and Cadderly heard splashes below as chunks of mud and stone dropped into the lake. Another assassin hit the area but managed to fall back, knee-deep in the collapsing morass.
The man who had gone in headlong screamed as he dropped out the bottom, plummeting the twenty feet or so to the churning lake.
The entire section Cadderly had marked off slipped down right behind him.
Four stunned assassins stood at the edge of the fifteen-foot gap separating them from their intended quarry, staring in disbelief.
“She said that Deneir would demand of me,” Cadderly remarked to Danica, rubbing his throbbing temples. “And he will again, when we get to the inn.”
“You have come into some faith?” Danica asked as they fled, leaving behind the frustrated assassins’ curses and the clip-clap of many horses coming onto the bridge, bearing city guardsmen.
Cadderly looked at Danica as though she’d slapped him, but he calmed quickly and shrugged.
They heard the shouts of guardsmen and killers as the trapped assassins, one by one, dived for the cover of the water.
The way was clear, all the way back to the Dragon’s Codpiece, to dead enemies and dead friends.
NINETEEN
SORROW AND DIVINE JOY
Shouts continued to follow Cadderly and Danica after they left the bridge and made their way onto Lakeview Street. The steamy rays of the rising sun were quickly burning away the mist.
Carradoon had awakened to a travesty.
Lakeview Street was jammed with curious citizens and city guardsmen. Many heads turned to regard the young priest and his escort, Cadderly’s wide-brimmed hat, soaked, drooped on all sides. Pointing fingers turned the companions’ way as well, and soon a horseman, a city guardsman, pushed his way through the throng to stop in Cadderly’s path.
“Are you a priest of the Edificant Library?” the guardsman gruffly asked.
“I am Cadderly, of the Order of Deneir,” the young priest replied. He turned to Danica and shrugged, embarrassed and almost apologetic, as soon as he had spoken the last few words.
“We’re making our way back to the Dragon’s Codpiece, the inn of Fredegar Harriman,” Danica explained, tossing Cadderly a sidelong glance, “to check on the friends we were forced to leave behind.”
“Forced?” Cadderly and Danica knew the question was a test. The guardsman’s eyes remained narrow and searching as he continued to scrutinize them.
“You know what occurred,” Cadderly replied without hesitation.
The guardsman nodded gravely, apparently satisfied with the explanation. “Come, and quickly,” he bade them, and he used his horse to nudge aside any who stood to block the couple’s progress.
Neither Cadderly nor Danica enjoyed that stroll down Lakeview Street, fearful that among those many watching eyes loomed some belonging to their assassin enemies. And even more fearful to the companions, considering the guard’s grim tone, loomed the possibility that the victory back at the inn had not been without cost.
Their fears did not diminish when they passed the inn two doors down, where Ivan and Pikel had been staying, to find that the front rail, the window above the door, and the wall beside the door all had been smashed apart. The innkeeper, sweeping glass and wood shards from his front porch, regarded the two with suspicion, not looking away and not blinking once as they passed.
Cadderly paused and sighed deeply when the Dragon’s Codpiece came into sight. He spotted the balcony of his room, the place he had used as a sanctuary from the harshness of the world for the past several tendays. The front rail lay in the street. One plank, the one that had supported Danica’s ride to safety, hung out at a weird diagonal angle. There were no bodies in the street—thank the gods!—but Cadderly saw a crimson stain on the cobblestones beneath his room, and a larger one halfway across the wide street.
Danica, apparently sensing his distress at the sight, hooked her arm around his and lent him support. To her surprise, Cadderly pulled away. She looked at him, to see if she had done something wrong, but his return stare was not accusing.
He stood straight and tall, took another deep breath, and squared his shoulders.
Danica understood the significance of those simple gestures. Cadderly had finally accepted what he’d been forced to do. He would not run away, as he had in Shilmista, he would meet the threat head-on, strike back against those who meant to strike at him. But could he do so, Danica wondered, without ghosts like Barjin’s hovering beside him for the rest of his days?
Cadderly walked past her then smiled and waved when “Oo oi!” sounded from the door of the Dragon’s Codpiece.
Pikel Bouldershoulder stepped onto the front porch. The dwarf held Cadderly’s lost walking stick high above his head and waved excitedly with a heavily bandaged hand.
Danica waited a moment longer and let Cadderly get far ahead of her, considering the perceived shift in the young priest’s demeanor. A continuing stream of violent events was forcing Cadderly to grow up, to thicken his hide, in a hurry. Violence could be a numbing thing, Danica knew. No battle is ever harder to accept and fight than the first, and no killing blow made with more reluctance than the first.
Watching her lover stride confidently to join Pikel, th
e young monk was afraid.
By the time Danica caught up to Cadderly, he stood silently inside the inn with both dwarves, to her relief, and with a teary-eyed Fredegar Harriman. Danica held in check her elation at Ivan and Pikel’s good health, though, for she followed Cadderly’s gaze to a table in the hearth room, to Headmaster Avery’s sprawling corpse. The chest was torn wide and revealed a gaping hole where the heart should have been.
“My Brennan,” broken Fredegar sobbed. “They killed my poor Brennan!”
Cadderly let his gaze drift across the sacked room to the broken stairwell, the shattered chandelier atop its rubble, and to the charred floor beside the long bar. A young, unmarked body had been laid beside the bar along with a row of six corpses, one of them still releasing wisps of smoke from under the cloth that covered it.
“Four of them, at least, got away,” Ivan informed them.
“You will find another one on the roof,” Danica remarked.
“Oo oi,” Pikel chirped, snapping his stubby fingers and motioning for one of the guards to go and check.
“Maybe only three got away,” Ivan corrected.
“Seven got away,” Cadderly said, remembering the three men who had assaulted him and Danica from the water, and the four others in the pursuing boat.
Ivan shook his yellow-bearded face and grumbled, “Well, there’s a pack of trouble for ye.”
Cadderly hardly heard the dwarf. The young priest walked slowly across the cluttered floor toward the body of the man who had served him as a father for as long as he could recall. Before he got there, though, a tall man, a city guardsman, intercepted him.
“We have some questions,” the man demanded.
Cadderly eyed him dangerously. “They will wait.”
“No,” the man retorted. “They will be answered when I say. And fully! I’ll brook no—”
“Leave.” It was a simple word, spoken quietly and in controlled tones, but to the city guardsman, it struck like a thunderbolt. The man stood up very straight, glanced around curiously, and headed for the front door. “Come along,” he instructed his fellow soldiers, who, after exchanging surprised glances, obeyed without complaint.