She lay back, goose bumps peppering her arms and shoulders. “So what will he do next?”
“I don’t know, Tyannon.” Corvis, too, lay back, staring sightlessly at the ceiling. “All my plans culminated at Denathere; whatever he does next is his own.”
WITH THE TOWN’S DECISION MADE—if “wait and see” could be called a decision—the inhabitants of Chelenshire did just that. Terrifying as the news of Audriss’s depredations might be, there was the sense, prevalent in all isolated communities, that it affected them only peripherally. Regardless of which of Imphallion’s major cities was next—even if Mecepheum itself was the warlord’s ultimate goal—there should be no need to involve Chelenshire directly; there were many routes from Denathere to the other major cities, and Chelenshire was quite some distance from any of them. Certainly, if the rightful government of regent and Guilds was overthrown, there would be consequences for everyone, but the citizens of the village could see no immediate threat.
Corvis was rather less complacent. The details of Audriss’s plan—of his plan—nagged at him, the final clinging pains of a hangover he couldn’t shake. He’d possessed but a single copy of his targets and strategies for the war he waged two decades past: one lonely document, penned in his own hand. The idea that it could somehow have made its way to a complete stranger, so many years later, was disturbing in the extreme.
But this alone was not the whole of his concerns. What bothered him beyond the “how” of the entire situation was the “why.” Tactically, taking Denathere was a piss-poor move. Corvis himself took the risk in search of a goal far more precious than the city itself, and it was a gamble he paid for with the scattering of his armies and the complete collapse of his plans. Anyone with so much as a student’s understanding of warfare could have looked at the details of his campaigns and rejected their end result as militarily unsound.
Audriss had already proved he was no stranger to the ways of battle, no incompetent tactician. Therefore, for him to have chosen to follow the plan despite its tactical flaws implied one of three things, none of which made Corvis feel any better.
One, the man was utterly insane.
Two, he knew far more about Corvis’s true objective than any man alive should possibly know. Even his closest lieutenants hadn’t been told what he sought in those tunnels beneath the city.
Or three, the warlord was sending a deliberate and personal message to Corvis himself.
All in all, not a one of them was a pleasant prospect.
But for all his questions, he could do little enough about it. And though he was distant and distracted for several days, slowly the routine of everyday life lulled him back into the same sense—of comfort, if not of complacency—that he and Tyannon had found in Chelenshire. And so he, too, merely watched and waited, for almost two weeks.
Until the afternoon before the regular town meeting, when everything changed.
“DID NOT!”
“Did too!”
Mellorin and Lilander clambered over a small rise, each shouting at the other with childish gusto. The argument was half an hour old now and revolved around the earth-shattering issue of which of them had started the last argument. For it was that previous conflict that resulted in them both being sent to gather firewood for cooking, allowing their beleaguered parents some few moments of peace. Mellorin had raised the argument—rather eloquently, she thought—that the pair of children, even working together, couldn’t haul as much wood as either parent alone.
It had, of course, been utterly ignored.
Grown-ups, she complained silently as she kicked a branch from her path and watched with angry satisfaction as it cracked against a nearby tree, make no sense at all. If kids ran the world, we’d all be better off.
She halted, startled, as a second muffled crack followed the first. She examined the stick, but no, only one break there. It occurred to her only then that the rustling of the leaves ahead—which she had attributed to the light breeze blowing past them—ceased the instant the crack sounded, though the breeze was undiminished.
Mellorin was a remarkably intelligent girl, and it took her no time at all to realize there was someone in the wood near them.
Clever as she might have been, though, she had also grown up in Chelenshire, surrounded by friendly, gentle people. “Hello?” she called curiously. “Who’s there?”
The brush exploded in a sudden flurry of movement. Mellorin leapt back, screaming with shock and the first stirrings of fear. She saw a huge shape, a shaggy beard, and smelled the sour stench of flesh long unwashed. A sudden sharp, blazing pain on the side of her head, and then darkness.
Lilander, eyes wide, watched from deep in the bushes, where he’d fallen as his sister leapt back. He saw the big man pick Mellorin up and throw her over his shoulder, saw him move deeper into the trees, saw the large sword the man wore strapped to his back.
When he was certain the man wasn’t coming back, he turned and, carefully retracing his steps as only a determined child can, made his way toward home.
CORVIS AND TYANNON STOOD in the doorway, idly watching Rascal dance across the grass, racing from one side of his pen to the other and back again. Corvis’s arm rested on the back of her shoulders, her head upon his left bicep, her hair trailing down across his side and his back.
“Quiet,” he said to her, his tone one of utter marvel. “I’d forgotten what it sounded like.” He chuckled, then, as Rascal skidded to a stop just before the fence, sending clods of dirt to spray across the painted wood.
“Maybe we should build one of those for the kids,” Tyannon suggested. “It seems to keep the horse happy.”
“No good. The children have fingers and thumbs. They can climb.”
“True. I—”
“Lilander!” Corvis called suddenly. And indeed, there was the boy, trudging tiredly across the stretch of garden that separated him from his parents. His father began to grin, an expression that quickly fell at the sight of his son’s face, dirt-covered and tear-streaked.
“Lilander?” Tyannon asked, concerned. “Sweetie, are you all right?”
“Where’s your sister?” Corvis interjected, his heart racing.
“Bad man!” the boy sniffed, his lip quivering. “A bad man took Mellorin.”
The look on his face left no doubt that this was not just a child’s fantasy. “Corvis!” Tyannon gasped.
“Take Lilander inside. Stay there!”
“But—”
“One of us has to stay with him, Tyannon.”
She nodded, fighting back tears of her own, acquiescing not so much to his words as to his tone. There was fear in his voice, of course, but anger as well; a slow, smoldering anger she hadn’t heard in years.
Corvis set out across the garden at a dead run, pausing only to lift a long-handled spade from where it leaned against a fence post. He hefted it once, as though testing it for balance, and then he was gone, his long-legged lope carrying him out of sight before Tyannon could blink.
“Mommy?” At the insistent tug on her pant leg, she stared down into the serious eyes of her six-year-old son. “Mommy, is Mellorin going to be all right?”
“Yes, honey.” She picked the child up in her arms, cradling him to her breast and rocking slightly. “Yes, Mellorin will be fine.”
I don’t know! she wanted to scream, to him, to the heavens, to the faces of the gods themselves. She could be dead, or worse! I don’t know if she’s going to be all right! I don’t know!
About her—or her father.
And she held him tightly to her, so he couldn’t see her tears.
SHE’D BEEN CONSCIOUS for some moments by now. But the disorientation, the sudden bouts of dizziness, and the pounding pain in her skull conspired to keep her from forming a coherent thought or from making any meaningful observations about where she was.
She blinked, trying to clear her vision; the side of her face was plastered with something sticky. She felt several strands of her hair on her cheek, appa
rently glued there by the substance she steadfastly refused to acknowledge as blood.
A deep breath, two, three, and the pain faded ever so slightly. The muffled buzzing in the air resolved itself into voices, and the voices into words.
“… a damn idiot!” was the first thing she heard. “An absolute, undeniable, as-the-gods-are-my-witnesses idiot!”
“I didn’t think it was that big a deal,” a second voice protested. “What’s your problem?”
“What’s my problem? Have your eyes gone the way of your wits, man? She’s my godsdamn problem!”
Mellorin knew full well who “she” was.
“No one’s supposed to know we’re here!” the first voice continued, building up steam for a good long rant. “Now you’ve gone and grabbed one of them! It’ll only be a matter of hours before someone misses her and comes looking! You—”
“Oh, shut up, Brend! Just shut up! It’s no big deal! They’ll figure an animal got her. Besides, we’ll be long gone by the time they start looking. We were about done here anyway.”
“And I suppose you plan to drag her with us?” the other man—Brend?—asked.
“Nah. We’ll mangle the body a bit, make it look like wolves or something, and leave it.”
If any of the men heard her gasp, they must have attributed the sound to the wind or some woodland creature, for not a one of them so much as glanced her way.
“So,” a third voice cropped up, “if we’re gonna kill the little bitch anyway, why’d you bother to bring her here alive in the first place?”
“Well, I thought we might get some use out of her before we left …”
“You,” Brend said, voice cold, “are a sick man, Varbin. She can’t be more than twelve.”
“Doesn’t make her any less female, does it?”
“Hey!” the third voice said as a vaguely face-shaped blur appeared in her fuzzy field of vision. “She’s awake!”
Rough hands dragged her to a sitting position; the rest of the world spun in the opposite direction, and the pain in her head flared. Gingerly, she raised a hand to her head, discovering only then that her wrists were bound together.
“What …,” she asked weakly, swallowing around the painful dryness in her throat. “What do you want with me?”
“That,” the man kneeling before her said sagely, “is under debate.” A few crude chuckles sounded from behind him—more, in fact, than could be accounted for by the three voices she’d heard thus far. “What’s your name, girl?”
“Mellorin.” She swallowed again. Don’t show fear. They can sense fear. At least that was supposed to be the case with wild dogs, and seeing as how she had no other experience to fall back on … “What—what’s yours?”
The man grinned, the expression seeming to gleam horribly on his unshaven, greasy face. His hair, dark and filthy, fell about his head and danced as he laughed. “My name doesn’t matter, Mellorin.”
Mellorin tried her best to smile. “Really? That must be frustrating.”
The smile on the man’s face vanished as though she’d sliced it off with a knife. This was not the way helpless victims—especially children—were supposed to behave.
A curved blade sprouted from his hand and jabbed forward, coming to a halt just before it drew blood on the side of her throat. He was rewarded with a sudden sob.
“That’s better. You shouldn’t be so rude to us, young lady. When people are rude to us, it makes us upset. We tend to be rude back.”
“There are no animals around here,” she whispered, fighting back tears. “No dangerous ones, anyway. If you …” Her voice broke. “If you kill me, they’ll know it wasn’t an animal!”
The man kneeling before her blinked once and looked back for support. The sweaty, bearded man who’d grabbed her in the first place—Varbin, she remembered—merely shrugged. “So they’ll know it wasn’t an animal. We’re still not planning to be anywhere near here by the time they find her. So what’s the big deal?”
With a small shriek, Mellorin thrust the man’s arm, and the knife along with it, away from her throat, beating on his chest with her bound hands. More startled than anything else, he fell back, staring at her. And then he reached out with his other hand and slapped her across the face, just beneath the earlier wound. Mellorin recoiled, agony racing through her skull.
“Please!” she screamed at him as the man’s shape loomed over her, knife held before him. “Please don’t hurt me!”
The man took a step closer to her, then another …
And then a second shape towered above her, looming tall between her and her attackers.
“She said ‘please.’” Mellorin, though nigh paralyzed with fear, sobbed in relief when she recognized the voice. “You really, really should have listened.”
TO ONE SIDE, half a dozen men, all large, filthy, and well armed. On the other, a lone figure, long hair wild about his neck and shoulders, easily half again the age of his eldest opponent, armed with only a heavy spade.
It was not a discrepancy that Brend, Varbin, or the others failed to notice. A mocking, contemptuous grin settled upon the features of every man present.
“You seem overmatched, old man,” Brend told him, taking a confident step. The resemblance between the new arrival and their captive didn’t escape his attention. “Her father?”
Corvis nodded once.
“How cozy. You came to die with her.”
These men had worked together for several years, and for all their bickering, they moved and fought as one. Even before he’d finished speaking there was a sudden lunge, not from Brend, but from the man who’d held his knife to Mellorin’s throat, intended to quickly end what negligible threat the girl’s father might pose. They’d used the tactic many times before, and it never failed to catch the target off-guard.
There is, as the saying goes, a first time for everything.
A blur of movement, a sudden hum in the air, and the spade flashed downward, striking the man’s forearm edge-on. A hideous crack reverberated throughout the woods, instantly followed by an agonized scream. The man stared, eyes filled with tears of pain, at his arm and at the two separate ends of what was once a single bone, now protruding through torn and mangled flesh.
His face slack with shock, Brend stepped toward Corvis, his hand dropping frantically toward the hilt of his sword. Corvis met him halfway, jabbing with the butt-end of the tool. Brend, sword dangling from its scabbard, fell to the ground thrashing, a bubbling sound in his throat as he tried to draw breath through a crushed windpipe.
The other four men charged as one, Varbin leading the attack, a cry of rage on his lips. Four swords rose in the air, clutched in hands eager to kill this interloper, to rend him limb from limb and feed the surrounding soil with his blood.
The environment itself conspired against them. One man fell, his boots tangled in a protruding root that he would have sworn was not there mere instants before. Before he could rise to his hands and knees, Corvis’s spade landed, point-first, on the base of his skull. Another thug hauled back to take a mighty swing, only to find his blade lodged in an overhanging branch, granting his foe a precious moment to dance aside.
Even as Corvis swung the spade with his right hand, his left darted out and grabbed for the man’s wrist. By the time the body hit the forest floor, ribs caved in by the edge of the tool, Corvis held the man’s long sword in his other hand.
Varbin was next, falling to his knees as a shrub twisted beneath his feet; as he plummeted earthward, the flat end of the spade rose up to meet him, spreading his nose across the rest of his face. The blow might or might not have been sufficient to kill him. Corvis, growing more tired than he let on, was not about to take any such chance, and finished the fallen man with a quick downward stab of the stolen sword.
That left only one man unwounded. He, fully aware of his fate should he continue to fight, allowed his sword to tumble into the dirt and dropped to his knees. “Yield!” he shouted, staring upward, his eyes implori
ng. “I yield!”
“Very well.” Corvis stuck the bloody long sword into the earth behind him, reached out with his vacant hand, and dragged the first man he’d struck—who stood, sobbing and staring at his ruined arm—to stand beside the one who’d surrendered. Then, keeping one eye upon the pair of them, he knelt down in the grass and hugged his shaking daughter to him.
“Did they hurt you, sweetheart?”
“They … they hit me on the head,” Mellorin told him, twisting so he could see the blood matted against her skull, plastering her hair to her face. “And they … they were going—”
“Shhh. It’s all right now. Everything’s all right. We’re leaving in just a few minutes.”
“Can’t we go home now?” she implored.
“In just a bit, sweetheart, I promise.” He turned his own head, so she couldn’t see the burning in his eyes. “Daddy has something he has to do first. And I need you to do something for me, Mellorin.”
“But—”
“I need you to rest.”
Carefully disentangling himself from her arms, he rose smoothly to his feet. A short muttered incantation, and Mellorin fell into a restful, painless sleep. It was a shame the spell wouldn’t work on an alert subject, one not already on the edge of unconsciousness. But then, Corvis wanted them awake. Aware.
Feeling.
The prisoners blanched, falling back before the doom they saw etched across his features.
“You first,” he said, facing the uninjured man. “Who sent you here?”
“No—no one!” he stammered, edging backward. “We’re just—just wandering bandits! We—”
Corvis nodded once, and then the spade flashed upward. It hit directly between the man’s legs; his scream wasn’t quite sufficient to drown out the sound of his pelvic bone cracking under the impact.
“As you can see,” Corvis said mildly to the man with the broken arm, gesturing with the bloody tool at the quivering shape on the ground, “I’m in no mood to have my time wasted. Who sent you?”