by Eve Forward
With the last ounces of his strength, Sam climbed out the window and slid down the trellis, climbed heavily aboard the gray horse and clung tight as it galloped after Arcie’s mount.
The two riders charged through a clustering mass of guards and ran through the town, through the gates, out into the fields and farms beyond, then vanished with the blood-red sun into the forested hills of the wilderness.
“How are ye doing, Sammy?”
Sam opened his eyes to a bleary sky filled with red curls and blue eyes and white teeth. He gasped and tried to roll away, but suppressed pain flared in his side and hands, bringing him back to the present. He shook his head and groaned.
“Pooka piss, Arcie, where are we? What happened?”
Satisfied as to the well-being of his companion, Arcie sat back on a hillock and commenced filling his pipe.
“Have a look around, old chap.”
Sam looked. They were in what he supposed was called a glen, or maybe a meadow; he wasn’t sure of the proper term. Woods on all sides, the two horses grazing a short way off, and a glossy black raven watching him from a dead tree to see if he was going to die or not. He thought about throwing something at it, but with the way his hands felt he didn’t think he could. He looked at them.
They were a rich blue-purple all around the wrists in a six-inch spread, and one hand was almost black with dried blood. Dried blood also caked a gash in his side, bound inexpertly with shreds torn from his cloak. As he summed up his wounds, recent events slowly returned to his memory, and he sank back in the grass with a groan.
“Arcie, you overweight son of a tomato, how could you do this to me? How could you set me into bloodfever when I was already four-thirds drunk and after an arch-mage at that?” He looked at his raw hand. “And you don’t even bother to bind my wounds.”
“I’m a thief, not a healer, Sam,” Arcie reminded him, lighting his pipe. “I did the one on yer side, though. Ye bled all over the horse, had to stop ye from leaving a trail. Careless of ye. Ye slept all night.” The Barigan grinned at Sam over clouds of blue smoke. “It was your wrists and hangover or both of our souls, Sam ... Ye were great, though, really fierce. Snap wham crash! Did ye kill him?”
Sam stood and shook his aching head. The sun beat down, bright and unseasonably warm. They must be about a day’s normal ride out of the city. “No. He got away.”
“Och, well.” Arcie shrugged philosophically. “Forget it then. Urk!”
Sam picked the thief up by the front of his cloak, and raised him up to eye level. The lank black hair around his face made him look almost supernatural. His voice was dangerously soft.
“Backing out of a deal, little man?” he asked kindly.
Arcie wriggled to clear his windpipe enough to speak.
“Urk, uhg, no, no, course not. ‘is ‘ead. T’ousand gold. Paid on deli’vry...” He grimaced ingratiatingly. Sam set him down gently and flexed his sore fingers.
“I thought not. One doesn’t hire an assassin lightly. I want a deposit. Five hundred.”
“Two hundred,” retorted the Barigan.
“Three or I rip your head off.”
“Dinna get so vicious.” Arcie tossed him a small emerald.
“I’ve had that valued at three-fifty... gives ye a margin for not trusting me.”
Sam pocketed the stone. “You don’t bother to carry paste, I know that much.” Indeed, the thief carried quite a sizable sum of wealth with him at all times, in the form of gold and platinum buckles and buttons on his clothing, and gems contained in various pouches, always ready for a quick bribe or getaway to safer cities.
Arcie adjusted his clothes and his dignity. “There’s a brook over yonder if ye want to wash up ... I would, if I were you. Ye look a fair grunge-worm.”
Sam went to look. The brook was clean, bubbling softly over a lot of little pebbles. Arcie followed him and sat down to finish his pipe.
Sam dipped his hands into the water where it swirled in a clear deep pool. His scrapes stung painfully at first, but the cold water soon numbed them. He began working at the caked blood.
“Are ye going to go back and kill him, then?” Arcie asked after a moment.
“No...” replied Sam thoughtfully. “I’m certainly not going to go berserk again, no matter how entertaining it may be for you. It’s time for calm, cool, collected action.”
His blood swirled red in the clear water. “He’s going to come to me. He’s going to come looking for me. And you. He’s going to get friends and they’re all going to come looking for us, to save us from ourselves. They’re all going to come after us.”
“Will they bring food, d’ye think?” wondered Arcie, looking up at the sun. “I’m half-famined.”
Sam noticed that he too was getting hungry. “We’re in a forest... aren’t there supposed to be berries or mushrooms or rabbits or something like that around?”
“We could perhaps eat that big black bird,” suggested Arcie, looking up at the raven. It clicked its beak at them and shuffled farther down the branch.
“I think, before you go eating anyone, you should explain what you are doing, polluting my stream with your blood,” a powerful female voice said, not three feet from Sam’s ear as a figure stepped inexplicably from the trunk of a solid tree. Arcie was so startled he dropped his pipe, and Sam fell neatly into the pool. The raven flew off, croaking.
“Never would have thought of ye as a blond, Sammy.”
“Shut up.”
The two refugees were huddled in the strange home of their equally strange hostess. After an initial bit of suspicion on all sides she had apparently decided to apprehend them, but the promise of food made the idea not unwelcome to the pair. The young woman had led them through the tangled forest, Arcie ducking under branches, and Sam bruised, sore, soggy, and covered with mud, as well as leafmold and twigs, by the time he had clumsily scrabbled through the thick vegetation.
They had arrived at a stone hill that thrust through the leaf-covered forest floor, and their hostess had pushedc aside a lethal-looking thorn bush to reveal an open doorway.
Arcie was allowed to enter, but she gave Sam a scathing glance and directed him frostily to a nearby well, with instructions to wash himself thoroughly. Sam, chastened, weakened by loss of blood and a hangover, had gone to comply.
Arcie mused what sort of woman had to be so foolish as to think she could stand up to a pair of city-hardened criminals, and what sort of treasure such a woman might carry. His speculations were cut short as he walked into the softly lit cave in the stone and came face to face with a pair of yellow-green eyes looking down at him.
He quickly decided that any woman who kept a wildcat twice his size was not someone he was going to bother. A quick professional inspection of the room revealed nothing of interest to him other than food, so he had submitted to accepting instead a huge wooden bowl of some kind of vegetable stew. It was delicious, and his hostess seemed mildly pleased at his enthusiastic response to her cooking. He was on his third bowl when the sounds of footsteps were heard at the door. He looked up cheerily and reacted in surprise as Sam finally entered, dripping but clean and was told to shut up as the assassin looked warily around. Arcie followed his gaze.
The place looked like it had been hollowed out from the living rock and quite suited his traditional Barigan preferences for warm sturdy shelter. The wildcat watched him from a corner near a small cooking fire that exited through a hole in the roof. Shelves were stacked with baskets, firewood, wooden and battered metal cookware, and a few old, tattered leather books. Bunches of dried herbs and wild tubers and dried fruit hung from hooks in the ceiling. Birds flew in the window and landed on the shelves now and then, would twitter around the room awhile, sometimes picking a few crumbs off the floor, and then fly out.
Sam himself was looking different. A check of his reflection in the mirrored surface of the well had given him cause to abandon his protective camouflage of grease and coal-dust hair mixture. A scrub with some vicio
usly harsh herbal soap left by the well and a few buckets of water had left him with his old innocent-looking sandyblond locks: A few more splashes took a good portion of the mud and blood and debris off his skin and clothing, a quick shave with a dagger, and then he’d caught himself, wondering what the hell he was doing washing up under the orders of some strange woman who walked through trees. He’d stomped back to the cave, following an aroma of vegetable stew and wondering what kind of assassin he was supposed to be, acting like this.
Arcie had been wondering the same thing. He turned from Sam to take another glance at the woman. Was she pretty? he wondered. A moment’s reflection decided that yes, probably by Sam’s standards, she was. She was too tall for Arcie’s tastes and stretched-out thin looking, but she did have a few qualities he recalled were attractive to others. She looked about Sam’s age, maybe a bit younger, but with a strange wisdom in her leaf-green eyes that made her seem older. She had long red hair, rather tangled and unkempt, pulled out of her eyes by a headband of cloth. She wore some kind of simple robe, tied with a cord and hung with cloth pouches. She held a gnarled oak staff with a crook on the end, a bit taller than herself, and was watching them warily. He glanced again at Sam, then shrugged and went back to eating.
Sam wordlessly took a bowl of stew from the woman and sat on another log. The woman leaned against the wall and watched them, finally speaking in her strong, cold voice.
“Well, you eat, so you must be living beings enough. Have you names?”
Arcie set his bowl down and tipped his cap. “Most certainly, dear lady. I be Fredly Mirtin, of Shiredale, and this here be a friend of mine, named Eithin Frazpot, he’s with a theater company ...” He smiled widely, settling his cap back on his curls. The woman regarded him coolly.
“You lie,” she replied calmly. “I heard you call this man ‘Sammy’ as he walked in here.”
Sam and Arcie exchanged glances, and Arcie shrugged.
“Och, right then. I’m called many things, but most of them are Arcie. That yonder are Sam. I’m a freelance tax collector, and Sam is...”
“... An assassin,” Sam stated bluntly.
“Ah yes,” replied the woman, as if she had known all along anyway. “You are what they call criminals. On the outskirts of this forest, to the west, a company of five men in armor are searching for you and getting quite lost.” Arcie chortled and reached for the water jug. “So, you are criminals, then? You lie, cheat, steal, break into the homes of innocent people and murder them and their families in their beds, spy, rape, incite riots, torture, loanshark, and similar?”
The water jug clattered on the floor, and Sam and Arcie stared at her in blank shock. The wildcat slowly unfolded itself from the corner and stood in front of her, watching them and twitching its tail. The two men checked the door. It was still open. With the way out thus assured, Arcie spoke up again hurriedly.
“Uh, nay, miss, I dinna think you’ve got it quite clear ... I mean, lying, aye, but that be just a survival tactic...”
Sam helped him out, while keeping an eye on the wildcat. “Cheat, well, we don’t cheat much. We don’t play that many games worth cheating over, mostly.”
“And steal, aye. I steal things. But how else am I supposed to make a living? There bein’t many options open to people my size, and my talents don’t lie in any other direction.” Arcie tried his best innocent eyes at her. She met them with frost. “As for breaking into houses...”
“And murder ...” Sam mumbled the word distastefully.
“Myself, I dinna usually kill people. I steal things so well that I surely dinna need to beat someone over the head to take his wealth away. Myself, I’ve only killed once or twice, p’raps, and that fully in self-defense .. well, mostly,” Arcie shrugged.
“And neither I nor any of my compatriots has ever murdered an entire family in their beds,” said Sam. “We kill whom we must, whom we are hired to, and we do it well and mercifully. Torture is not a service we provide. We never kill on a whim or for fun. We are hired, just as mercenaries are. If you are not strong enough or skilled enough to build your own barn, you hire someone to build a barn for you. If you lack the will and strength and training needed to kill someone whom you need to. kill, you hire someone to kill him for you.”
Arcie continued, “Spying and riots and loansharking, miss, them’s not our trade ... not usually, anyway. Not many people exists as trusts a thief to spy without robbing the place blind and so gets noticed. Assassins are too stuck up taste do anything but what as they’re trained for, and even if ye can convince them, they charge far too dear.” Arcie glanced over at the assassin as he spoke.
Sam ignored the comment. He was noticing that his boot dagger, his three specialized throwing knives, his two cuff blades and his camelian-pommeled dagger seemed to be missing. Damn you, Arcie, you thief he thought. He’d deal with this later.
The thief continued. “And no one’s loan-sharked since the Victory, not with the government’s handing out welfare to get everyone back on their feet... everyone except those of us what can’t claim a legitimate occupation.”
Sam’s voice was cold and distant, his eyes flashing a strange anger and bitterness as he spoke.
“And neither of us has ever raped anyone or anything, at least I assume Arcie hasn’t been...” He glanced at the Barigan, who shook his head.
“I’m only insistent about money and meals. Besides, women are nothing but trouble. My father always did say...”
“Rape and brutal murder and mugging and other violent, unprofessional acts ... those are unorganized crime,” interrupted Sam. “Crimes of insanity, or rage. The people who do that sort of thing often aren’t criminals beforehand. Just jealous spouses, angry young men, and people who aren’t quite swimming in the same river as the rest of us. They give us criminals a bad name.”
“Sometimes us has to weed them out, ye ken ...”
“Yes,” nodded Sam. “... if they persists. Our Guilds dinna put up with that kind of dangerous action from their members, and we don’t like getting the blame for actions o’ nonmembers.”
Arcie managed to look noble.
“Admittedly,” added Arcie, “we’ve had less work for ourselfs since the Victory. The system are breaking apart, and we’re becoming obsolete.”
The woman’s eyes watching them widened slightly.
“You are speaking the truth,” she noticed, seeming somewhat surprised. “More or less, anyway ...”
Sam relaxed a little, and concluded, “In the society in which we evolved, we were a vital part, somehow ... law and crime and disorganized anger, and the civilians milling through it all. It was a sort of balance.”
“Yes. A balance.” The wildcat curled up again, and Sam and Arde breathed deep sighs of relief.
The woman pulled up a log and sat at the table. “I had hoped you were such ones, a dark element but not to the extent that you would not comprehend what I must tell you. Continue your meal, and I will explain.” The Barigan grinned and snagged a loaf of bread from a nearby shelf and began sawing it in half with a knife that Sam recognized as one of his own, but the assassin was feeling too tired to bother with it now. Sam sipped his stew and watched the woman warily as she began to speak.
“My name, if you wish to know it, is Kaylana. I am what in the olden days was known as a Druid, though now the best I can explain myself is as one who understands and can utilize the power of nature.”
“Really?” exclaimed Arcie. “Och, I might have guessed ... the mistletoe, the pets, the vegetarian stew...”
“The way you walk through trees,” muttered Sam.
Kaylana ignored them and continued.
“There are no more Druids existing in the world now, as you may know... all were slain in the last bloody wars before the Victory.”
“Seems to me I remember hearing of something like that. I were just a wee lad at the time, of course ...”
“You weren’t even born,” scoffed Sam. “Neither was I. That was over a h
undred and fifty years ago.” Arcie grinned apologetically at him, and went on talking to Kaylana. “... dinna they all get snuffed by the forces of Darkness?”
“I heard that they joined the Darkness, there at the end, and the forces of good had to destroy them,” put in Sam.
“You are both correct. We-they, fought on the side of Light when the Darkness threatened to overthrow the world, in the winter of the Wars. Then when the Darkness was in retreat, and the Light had pulled back to reform as well, the Druids stood away. They refused to help the Light any farther, to heal their wounded or guide them to the foe or turn the weather in their favor. We hoped the war would end in stalemate. Our old allies grew angry, but soon had the strength to push home their attack on the Dark. As the Darkness began to retreat, we joined its forces and fought against the armies we had once served. Though we tried to aid them, the Darkness did not trust us, for we had helped the Light; they called us spies, and killed us. The Light called us traitors, and killed us. The armies ran through our forests, shot our animals, pulled our plants, burned our forests, and turned our plains into blood-soaked battlefields.”
Her voice had softened with remembered sorrow, and the wildcat padded silently over to sit near her. She stroked its huge head gently.
“But why did yer Druids do such? Turncoat as that, I mean?” asked Arcie, wide-eyed.
“It has to do with what we believe, and what we are, as keepers of the Balance. What do you know of Light and Darkness, Barigan?” asked Kaylana, watching him. He shrugged. He’d never thought about it much.
“Only of what I’ve heard,” he answered, and told her of Mizzamir’s explanation of...
“Lime mints, he called them,” finished the Barigan dubiously. “I weren’t paying much attention ...”
Sam shook his head. “No, it was something else ...”
“I know what the Barigan means,” inserted Kaylana.
“Your Elf mage is typical. What he does not realize is that light and goodness overtaking the world is just as terrible as evil and darkness engulfing it.”