Innkeeper Chronicles 3.5: Sweep of the Blade

by Ilona Andrews

  his arms out, saying something. She fought her way forward, dragging

  Karat, and the medic rammed into her, pushing her back, his voice

  insistent.

  Finally, the words penetrated. “…do not touch…”

  She had to stop. It took a few more seconds for her body to catch up

  with her mind. Maud stopped struggling.

  “…stable for now,” the medic said.

  Her mouth finally worked. “What happened?”

  Karat gently but firmly pushed her back to the antechamber. “Not here.”

  “I need to see her.”

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  “Stop,” the medic said. “Look at yourself.”

  Maud forced her gaze away from Helen and looked at her armor. She

  was smudged with Arland’s blood. She’d washed his arm and sealed the

  wounds, but some of it must’ve gotten on her when he kissed her.

  “I’ve got her stabilized,” the medic said. “You’re carrying a horde of

  germs and you’re covered in blood. You can’t help her by going in

  there. You can only hurt her.”

  Maud had to walk away. Everything in her screamed to get back in there,

  as if just walking up to the bed would magically fix everything, and Helen

  would sit up and say, “Hi, Mommy.” But it wouldn’t. It didn’t seem

  real. It felt like a dream, like some nightmare, and she wished

  desperately to wake up. She wanted to undo this. If only there was

  some button she could press to rewind it all back to normal.

  “Come with me,” Karat said.

  There was nothing she could do. Maud turned and walked into the

  antechamber. The medic and Karat followed.

  “What happened?” Maud asked again. Her voice sounded strange, like

  it was coming from someone else.

  “Helen was at the lake with other children,” Soren said. “The bugs were

  there as well, swimming in their designated area. After a while, the

  chaperones made the children get out of the water to take a break, warm

  up, and snack. The children ate and decided to play hunt and run.”

  Hunt and run was the vampire version of tag. Helen would’ve loved it.

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  “Helen ran close to the Tachi,” Soren continued.

  “Then one of them bit her!” Ilemina snarled.

  “Helen collapsed,” Soren said. “She was rushed here, to the

  medward. The Tachi was apprehended, and the rest of them are

  confined to their quarters. We tried to question him, but he refuses to

  talk. None of them are talking to us and harming him is out of the

  question until we know if Helen will survive.”

  That “if” hit Maud like sledgehammer. She wanted to sink to the floor,

  ball up her fists, and scream. But she had no time.

  “He bit a child.” Ilemina’s face was terrible. She bared her fangs, eyes

  blazing. A primal snarl shook her lips. It was like looking at rage

  personified. “I will slaughter every single one of them. I will decimate

  their planet. Their grandchildren will tremble when they see a vampire

  coming.”

  From anybody else, it would seem like grandstanding. But Ilemina meant

  every word. Otubar snarled in response. Karat gripped her blood

  sword. The entire room was a hair away from violence. This was how

  wars started.

  “It’s more complicated than that,” the medic said. “We have data on the

  Tachi venom, but there is a synthetic compound in her system

  inconsistent with what we know of the Tachi.”

  The sharp, jagged pieces snapped together in Maud’s head. Vampires

  cherished children. There was no greater treasure. They cherished

  Helen, too. They considered her one of their own. And then a bug bit

  her, like she was prey. It had awakened a primal response, the collective

  racial memory of Mukama, of invaders who devoured vampire children.

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  “Where is the Tachi now?” she asked.

  “Across the hall,” Soren told her. “You can’t hurt him, Lady Maud. He

  may hold the key to your daughter’s recovery.”

  “I need to speak with him.” She sank steel into those words.

  “Come with me.” Soren marched out of the room and into the hallway,

  to the door opposite the medward.

  Maud followed him, aware of Ilemina, Otubar, Karat, and the medic

  directly behind her. The door slid open, revealing a small cell. Inside it,

  a male Tachi sat on the floor, bound in a black captivity suit. Made from

  tough polymer and weighted to hinder movement, it wrapped around

  him like a straitjacket. Its exoskeleton had faded to barely visible grey.

  Maud marched into the room, dropped to her knees in front of him, and

  released the lock on the captivity suit. It fell away, and he sprang up to

  his full height above her.

  She jumped to her feet and bowed her head. “Thank you for saving my

  child.”

  The Tachi turned brilliant indigo blue. “You’re welcome, daughter of the

  Innkeepers.”

  Chapter 13 Part 2

  August 16, 2018 by Gordon

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  “Somebody better explain this to me,” Ilemina growled.

  “The Tachi venom isn’t lethal to most species.” Maud stepped aside,

  giving the Tachi room to stretch his wings. “It’s meant to put the prey

  into a suspended state, slowing down its life functions to preserve the

  freshness.”

  Karat winced.

  “If he wanted to kill Helen, he would’ve just sliced her head off,” Maud

  continued. “As soon as you said that he’d bitten her, I knew it wasn’t an

  attack.”

  Ilemina turned her glare onto the Tachi. “Why didn’t you say

  something?”

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  The Tachi spread his indigo appendages. The gesture looked so much

  like a human spreading his arms in a Gallic shrug, as if to say “none of

  this is my fault, I didn’t mess it up, you did, deal with it.”

  Ilemina turned to Maud. “What does that mean?”

  “It means he thinks you are a xenophobic species prone to rash and

  violent reactions, so he saw no point in explaining himself. You wouldn’t

  have believed him anyway.”

  Ilemina’s eyes narrowed. She pierced the Tachi with her stare.

  “I can’t make it simple for you,” he said.

  Ilemina flashed her fangs. “Try me.”

  The Tachi turned to Maud, switching to the akit dialect. “They think I

  killed the child; the royal is angry. Now they know I saved the child; she

  is angry. I do not comprehend this species. How have they ever

  managed to achieve interstellar civilization without self-destructing?”

  “Could you please tell me what happened to my daughter?” Maud didn’t

  even try to keep the desperation from her voice.

  The Tachi’s color lightened for a moment. “Yes, of course.” He folded

  his arms in an apologetic gesture. “I will use short thoughts. We were

  bathing. The children were running and making excited noises. Your

  child ran close to us. She was not afraid like the other children. They

  could not catch her. She ran too close and almost ran into me. Then she

  apologized for disturbing my tegah.”

  Maud had given Helen a primer on Tachi manners. Until now she had no

  idea any of it had stuck.

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  “She is such a polite child,” the Tachi said. “We spoke. Something hit

  her in the neck, on her left side. She fell. I caught her. I saw a wet spot

  on her skin. It smelled wrong. Her eyes rolled back in her head. I knew I

  had to act. I bit her to keep the poison from spreading.”

  “Which way was she facing when it hit her?” Soren asked.

  “She was turning away from me to rejoin the game. She was facing the

  rest of the children. The lake was on her right and the castle was on her

  left.”

  “A sniper shot from the bluff,” Otubar said.

  Karat bared her teeth in a grimace. “There is a clear line of sight from

  the western edge of the game grounds to the lake. They distracted us

  with the krim match, then goaded Arland into a fight, and while we were

  watching, they shot Helen.”

  “Pull the video feed,” Ilemina ordered. Karat took off at a run.

  There were implications and conclusions to be drawn from all of this, but

  right now, none of them mattered. “Did you recognize the

  poison?” Maud asked.

  “No,” the Tachi said. “I would know it again. It smelled strong.”

  The vampire medic failed to identify it and the Tachi didn’t know it. The

  Tachi coma wouldn’t last forever. It could fail at any moment. She had

  to do something now, or Helen would die. There was only one place she

  could turn.

  “I don’t have anything to trade.”

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  Everyone stopped and looked at her. She realized she had spoken out

  loud.

  Before she could explain, a half dressed Arland rounded the corner,

  somehow managing to look angry and confused at the same

  time. “What the hell is going on?”

  Soren blinked. “Why are you out of armor?”

  “Maud?” Arland closed in on her.

  She looked up at him, feverishly rummaging through the list of her

  meager possessions in her head.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Helen is poisoned, and I don’t have anything to trade.”

  “Will someone explain this to me?” Ilemina demanded.

  Understanding sparked in Arland’s eyes. “But I have things to

  trade. They will trade with me or I will twist their heads off.”

  “Who?” Ilemina snarled.

  “Explain things to your mother,” Otubar boomed.

  “No time.” Arland grabbed Maud’s hand and pulled her down the

  hallway. Behind them the sound of a pissed off Preceptor shook the

  air. Arland sped up.

  “How are you still walking?” Maud squeezed out.

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  “Booster. Activated it before you took my armor off. I had plans. None

  of which involved a sedative.”

  “Arland Rotburtar Gabrian of Krahr!” Ilemina roared. “Stop this instant!”

  Arland ignored her. They were almost to the bend in the hallway.

  Suddenly Arland braked, and then the lees flooded all available space,

  their veils swirling, their jewelry shinning, tails and ears twitching. Maud

  saw Nuan Cee in the center of the lees mob and reached out to

  him. “Helen…”

  Nuan Cee took her hands into his furry hand-paws. “I know.”

  The rest of the lees rushed past them, washing over them like a wave,

  and rolled down the hallway, parting around Ilemina, Otubar, and Soren.

  “I have nothing to trade,” she said.

  Nuan Cee’s turquoise eyes shone. He grinned, displaying sharp, even

  teeth. “I am sure we can come to an arrangement.”

  “Get out of my medward, vermin!” the medic screamed.

  “Do not worry yourself.” Nuan Cee patted her hands, as a mob of lees

  carried the screaming medic out of his medward. “All will be well now.”

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  Chapter 13 part 3

  August 25, 2018 by Gordon 522 Comments

  Maud slumped in an oversized chair in Lord Soren’s study. She felt

  wrung out like a piece of wet laundry about to go in the dryer. The lees

  had treated Helen for the better part of an hour, and when Nuan Cee

  finally emerged from the med ward, Maud felt ready to tear her hair

  out. He had announced that the danger had passed, Helen would be up

  in a few hours, and there was no need to worry.

  Maud had been allowed to see her daughter and to kiss Helen’s warm

  forehead, and then the enraged vampire medic kicked everyone

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  out. She wanted to be back in the med ward, sitting by the bed, watching

  for minute signs of improvement, but it would accomplish nothing and

  Ilemina had requested her presence in her brother’s study.

  The Preceptor of House Krahr sat in a chair by Lord Soren’s desk, looking

  grim. Otubar sat on his wife’s right, Arland sat on Maud’s left. He had

  put on his armor and his booster kept him awake, but she could tell by

  the slightly feverish look in his eyes that a crash was coming. Karat took

  a spot at the opposite end of the room. Soren presided over it all, sitting

  behind his huge desk as if it were a castle wall and he was watching a

  horde of invaders gather for a siege. Except this time the invaders looked

  back at them not from a field before the castle but from a massive

  screen, where the recording of the events on the mesa played out.

  Maud had picked the furthest chair from the screen, maybe twenty feet

  away. It felt like miles. The room contained the Krahr, not the huge

  House, but the small nuclear family who ran it. She didn’t really belong

  here.

  “So we have no useable footage,” Arland said.

  Karat frowned. Her fingers danced across the tablet in her hand. The

  recording zoomed in past the game of krim, showing distant figures at

  the edge of the mesa. The image sped up and the figures jerked around

  in a slightly comical dance as knights mulled about.

  “We know that members of both Kozor and Serak were at the edge of

  the game grounds and had opportunity to fire the shot at Helen,” Karat

  said. “We know that none of them had a gun on them, so they had to

  have assembled it on location. See how they keep crowding each

  other? They could have assembled a small space craft, and we would

  have been none the wiser.”

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  “We should upgrade the surveillance,” Otubar said.

  Soren grimaced. “Do you want to assign each of them a personal

  drone?”

  “If that’s what it takes,” Otubar said.

  “We would be breaking every rule of hospitality,” Soren said. “They

  would accuse us of cowardice and paranoia and claim we made the

  wedding impossible. We already failed to protect a child in our care and

  we were almost too late to prevent a confrontation between our other

  guests and these…ushivim.”

  Karat jerked. “Father!”

  Maud blinked. Of all the words she had expected the Knight Sargent to

  use, the expletive meaning bloody diarrhea of diseased vermin was the

  last on the list.

  The corners of Otubar’s mouth rose a couple of millimeters. It was the

  closest she had ever seen the Lord Consort come to a smile.

  “They must think Karat is the Under-Marshal,” Arland said. “Maud told

  me they were trying to figure out who would assume the respons
ibility

  for her and Helen if I were incapacitated. But they’re not sure. They

  planned to take me out after the krim match, but they allowed for the

  possibility of failure. So, when I won the bout and walked away, they

  shot Helen.”

  “It was planned and premeditated,” Karat said. “As I pointed out, they

  had to have brought the weapon in pieces, assembled it on the spot, shot

  her, and disassembled it after. We scoured that entire area, on top of the

  mesa, and down by the beach. If they had dropped any part of it, our

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  scans would have picked it up. Each of them must have carried a small

  piece of it. It’s smart.”

  Soren nodded. “It’s brutal and underhanded, but it is smart. Had the

  child died, Lady Maud would be distraught, Arland would be in mourning

  with her, consoling her. He would have to withdraw from the

  wedding. It would be unseemly to continue.”