The Taxman and the Intruder
“We’d better make camp while there’s still a little light,” said Jhan.
Shannon looked up through the thick trees where the sunlight was rapidly vanishing, and she grimaced as if the sun were betraying them. A bramble bush entangled her pack, and she had to rip it loose, taking the usual spring-time compliment of thorn seeds with her. She noticed that the back of Jhan’s head seemed to be made up as much of burrs and seedlets as it was of hair, but he was stoically ignoring the pricks.
“Let’s hold on a little longer,” she said stubbornly.
“As if it’ll make a difference,” grumbled Jhan as he struck down hard with the Widow, the magical edge of the sword slicing a path through the heavy growth that surrounded them. Thick vines strung from tree to tree, forest laurel, bramble bushes, thorn shrubs, all had combined with the slippery leaves and the occasional fallen branch to hold back their progress throughout the day. They had taken turns hacking through the undergrowth, and if it hadn’t been for the magical sharpness of the weapons, they’d be traveling at a crawl.
This was the second day since leaving the Green Cliffs behind, and their pace had steadily fallen as the undergrowth closed in upon them. Shannon, glancing around, guessed they couldn’t have come more than a single league today.
“If this thick stuff continues, it’ll take us a month to reach Alston’s Fey,” Jhan grouched, cleaning the sap from the blade of the Widow.
“Don’t be such a grumbler,” said Shannon. “The forest is part of the Southlands, so there are bound to be logging roads or at least some sort of paths through this. To be honest, I’m a little surprised we haven’t stumbled across one already.”
“You’d find something positive to say even if we both had broken legs,” he answered.
“You’ll brighten up after a hot supper.”
“If you call salt pork stew a hot supper,” he said. “First thing I’m going to do when we reach this city is buy a loaf of bread. That’s what I miss most, fresh bread. Biscuits, muffins, rolls…”
Shannon snorted. “We’ve been gone for barely a week, and you act as if fresh bread hasn’t passed your lips in months.”
“My stomach’s a poor time-keeper,” he answered unabashed, scabbarding the sword.
He glanced up at the darkening sky and asked, “How much time do you think we saved coming down the cliffs?”
“Two days, perhaps even three,” she answered. “According to the Peddler’s map, the forest road winds a lot coming down from the plateau. We’ve certainly lessened my Father’s lead.”
“Maybe,” Jhan said. “But once he reaches the open plains, not even the wind will catch Andros.”
“He won’t be riding all the time,” she assured him. “It won’t be easy, but we’ll catch up with him, never fear.” She glanced around with a frown before adding, “Provided we can break free of this brush.”
“So what are you planning to do once we reach Alston’s Fey?” asked Jhan, raising the old, sore issue yet again.
Shannon mulled this over for a long moment, trying to shift through all the plans and doubts and ideas that had been accompanying her for the last two days. The old reply of finding Darius no longer seemed to fit her new thoughts.
“I’m not sure,” she admitted finally. “I’m beginning to see that the world is wider than the forest and bigger than just my Father and us. We’re stumbling into the middle of a war, Jhan. There are thousands and tens of thousands of innocent people at risk, and I feel our task must be greater than simply looking after a single warrior.”
“And just what do you think you can do?” Jhan retorted, rolling his eyes at her.
“I have some skill with weapons,” she began defensively.
“Some, perhaps. But in practice only. You’ve been raised in a nice, civilized little village where the greatest danger is falling out of a tree, and suddenly, you’re planning to be part of a war? It’s time you got out of the sun.”
Shannon bristled. “I’ve got just as much experience in fighting as you have! Everyone starts off scared and unsure at first, even my Father. But they learn to do what must be done.”
“Listen to the blood-banter!” laughed Jhan. “A girl who’s never missed a please or thank you in her life is going to start piling up corpses.”
“Let me tell you…” she began angrily, but something caught her eye just above the foliage. “Look!”
There, just visible through the trees in the gathering dusk, were two, three, no, half a dozen lights, torches just lit to keep back the night.
“I told you we had to be close to people!” she said. “Come on!”
They tore through the undergrowth with renewed vigor, eager to be free of the forest at last, but as they grew closer to the lights, they slowed. They could make out the shape of cottages in the clearing ahead, but it was the sound of loud voices, some angry, some frightened, that made them cautious.
“To learn…your taxes on time!” shouted the loudest and angriest voice. “Take it to heart!”
They reached the edge of the clearing and peered out to see perhaps a score of villagers gathered together in the middle of the tiny village, while four soldiers dressed in black armor and holding torches stood menacingly before them. As Jhan and Shannon watched, the leader of the soldiers walked up to the largest of the buildings and began to use his torch to set fire to its wooden roof.
“No!”
An older man dressed in the yellow robes of a priest of Mirna burst out of the little group and rushed up to the building, putting himself between the leader and the cottage.
“Humble it may be, but this is still a House of God,” the Priest proclaimed. “I will not let you harm it!”
Without hesitating, the leader lifted the torch and clubbed the man with it, knocking him to his knees.
“If you love the building so much,” he growled, “then you can share its fate.”
He savagely kicked the kneeling Priest right in the stomach and sent him sprawling over the threshold of his tiny church, slamming the door on the prostrate figure. He then lifted the torch again, and the old wood of the roof took instant fire.
Shannon shivered at the sight, but not with fear. Something powerful was rising, surging within her, a strength which had laid silent, untouched, throughout her young life stirring now at this vicious cold-blooded murder. More than courage and more than rage, she could no more resist it than she could resist drawing breath into her lungs. Without a word, Shannon stepped out of the safety of the brush and headed towards the leader.
“Shannon!” Jhan whispered frantically and lunged for her, but she ignored him, walking boldly forward. The villagers caught sight of her first, cringing back even further as if she were some new threat, and a moment later, one of the soldiers barked a warning. The leader, who had moved along the wall, firing the roof as he went, stopped and whirled around. He was a broad beast of a man, not particularly tall, with black hair and cruel eyes, and there was a silver chain around his neck that seemed to be an insignia of rank.
Shannon walked past the startled guards, going directly to the threshold, and she kicked the door in with her boot to reveal the feebly moving figure of the Priest on the floor in the gathering smoke. She grabbed the man roughly, knowing the surprise would last for only a few precious seconds longer, and she dragged him out of the burning church with one hard motion. The flickering of light warned her of movement behind her, the leader’s torch rising to strike again, and she rolled deftly aside even as the blow fell. She leaped back to her feet, her hand moving to her throwing daggers, and she flung one of the knives with flawless accuracy to bury in the man’s hand. With a bellow of pain, the leader dropped the torch, his eyes blazing with hatred. He grabbed a short sword from his belt with his left hand and charged forward, Shannon readying a second dagger. The other soldiers were coming as well, their swords raised, but the murderous fury of the leader was all that Shannon saw. She thought for an instant o
f throwing at the left arm, at a leg, at some non-lethal point, but the armor was too thick for her dagger.
With only another second’s hesitation, she launched her dagger and buried it right in the leader’s throat. He staggered, gagging blood, his hands going up to the wound, but his fury couldn’t be halted even by a mortal blow.
Shannon readied a third dagger and braced herself as the man stumbled forward, sword raised, still intent on cutting her down. But the blow never landed.
The black light of the Widow suddenly blazed between her and her assailant, and there was an explosion of sparks as the leader’s sword struck and burst apart. For a moment longer, the man stood staring at them as if in disbelief, his eyes already glazing with death, and then he fell, a human being no longer.
Shannon couldn’t tear her gaze away from the man and the pool of blood turning the ground to gory mud beside him, the man she had killed. A life taken, destroyed. By her. She suddenly understood that this was what her Father had tried to save her from, a fate he had feared even more than her own death: the loss of innocence. Staring down at the corpse, she did not regret her action, was not nauseated by the sight of the blood she had spilt, nor could not even honestly mourn the death of a man who could so readily kill defenseless people. But what did disturb her deeply was the knowledge that she would not hesitate to kill again under similar circumstances, and the death of this man had made those future killings much easier.
With this single act, she had become a warrior.
She looked away to find that they were virtually alone. Jhan was standing over the body of a second soldier, and the remaining two had fled, clearly having no taste for battle against that gleaming sword after the death of their officer. But the villagers, too, had vanished, taking advantage of the battle to flee into the wood, as if horrified and disgusted by her act. Only two men remained, dragging the helpless priest between them away from the burning building and eyeing the newcomers fearfully as they tried to follow their companions into the forest.
Shannon swallowed, took a small step towards them.
“Can we help?” she asked, her voice sounding strange even in her own ears.
“Go away!” the first man hissed, struggling towards the woods. “You’ve done enough damage already!”
Shannon blinked, taken aback by this hostility.
“What do you mean?”
“You killed an officer of the Army of Corland!” snarled the second man. “Duke Argus will see we all pay the price for that!”
“But she saved your Priest’s life!” said Jhan indignantly.
“For a few days maybe,” answered the first. “And maybe cost the rest of us ours! Now begone!”
With that, they reached the edge of the wood and vanished into the shadows, Jhan and Shannon both too stunned to do more than stand and watch.
“I…I never thought…,” Shannon began, choking slightly.
“And I never thought to see such ingratitude,” snapped Jhan. He turned towards the silent, watching wood and shouted, “Ingrates! Cowards! If you live like sheep, you’ll die like sheep!”
“Don’t, Jhan,” she said, putting a restraining hand on his arm. She was feeling suddenly sick, sick to her stomach, but only some of that nausea came from the killing of a man. She wanted nothing more than to put miles between themselves and this village; and yet she knew it was not this village from which she wished to flee.
“Shannon, you did the right thing,” Jhan said earnestly. “You saved a helpless man from being burned alive, and you defended yourself from a murderous attack. I only wish we had cut down the other two soldiers as well.”
“No…,” she said weakly, her soul in too much turmoil to say more, to even try to make him understand. Jhan thought she was troubled by this single death. He didn’t know, couldn’t know, that the real source of her distress were all the deaths that now lay before her.
Her reflections, however, were interrupted by a sudden oath from Jhan.
“Look at that!” he exclaimed, pointing down at the Widow.
Shannon looked down at the weapon he still held in his hand, and she actually blinked at the sight. The gleaming ebony of the blade had flaked away in two places, revealing a dull, cheap metal beneath. The single stroke which had destroyed the leader’s sword, had also finished the Widow.
“A fraud,” Jhan said in disgust. “A cheap blade treated with some magical powder that wears off after only a few blows.”
“And we wasted most of it hacking through brush,” Shannon snorted, half in anger, half in grim humor. “Well, we now know why it’s called the Widow.”
Jhan, however, saw nothing amusing in it. “If I ever come across that Peddler again, I’ll roll him and his wagon over the Green Cliffs with this cheap tin tickling his ribs.”
“I doubt you’ll ever get the chance,” she answered. She looked over to where the light from the burning building showed a forest road leading out of the village into the gathering darkness of evening. “Come on. We’ve found a road, at least. Let’s get away from here. We can make camp a few miles farther along.”
* * * * *
Tallarand took a sip of his evening wine and settled himself comfortably at his desk in the rich library of his house some miles from Alston’s Fey, ignoring for the moment the mass of papers set out on the desk before him. It felt good to be home again. He had just returned after a journey of several weeks, a dull and tedious expedition that had nothing to recommend for it except profit; indeed, if it hadn’t been for his encounter with Darius at the Green Cliffs, the trip would have been hopelessly boring.
Darius. Tallarand tasted the name in his mind as he rolled the fine vintage over his tongue, savoring both. The battle at the High Pass had shown the accuracy of his appraisal of the warrior’s ability, and Tallarand had received a full report of Darius’ arrival in the Fey. The presence of the Paladin so close at hand seemed an opportunity waiting to be exploited, and he found himself wondering again what use he might make of their acquaintance. Then he sighed and put the thought aside for now. After a long journey, it was necessary to catch up on all the events that had occurred in his absence, though he couldn’t help grimacing at the large pile of paper arranged neatly on the desk before him.
Montgomery, his chief bookkeeper, had placed this mass of reports, articles, and forms here for him to look over, and Tallarand knew better than to let his impatience simply skim through the papers. Montgomery had proven his worth on too many occasions, demonstrating just how critical good information could be, so Tallarand took another long sip of wine and began reading carefully.
From the top of the pile, he lifted a group of three small newspaper articles pinned together with a small note from Montgomery on top, a note supplying a few extra details not included in the articles. Tallarand glanced over the clippings, a small smile on his face. A young woman’s body found in the back room of a tavern, a headless corpse floating in the Delmar River, another discovered on the high road to Monarch, perhaps the victim of bandits. Three apparently unrelated deaths except for one fact noted by Montgomery but not the papers: all three bodies bore the secret dagger tattoo of the Slayer’s Guild. A trio of assassins dispatched without so much as a clue as to their intended target.
Tallarand chuckled lightly to himself. The Guild-Master in Alston’s Fey was Dralbax, a born fool with the morals and viciousness of a starving wolf, but the man had chosen the wrong victim this time. Better men than Dralbax had tried and failed to collect a cut of Adella’s takings, and the man should have simply accepted the realities of the situation. Of course, there may well have been other forces at work here, for a whisper had reached Tallarand’s ears that the commission for the Slayers had come from a much more powerful source than the Guild-Master of Alston’s Fey. Those were rumors to be held and treasured.
He let out another sigh and turned back to the endless pile of papers, checking the movement of goods in Azare, the latest edicts from Brillis, Lord High Mayor of the Drift, ne
w security arrangements for the cargo boats plying the Delmar River. The truth was that often a simple decision based on the information supplied and organized by Montgomery brought him in more money than a week of more interesting (and dangerous) activities. But that was poor compensation for this ordeal. The glass of wine was empty, his patience already dwindling, and the pile was no more than half-gone.
The tiniest half-sound came to Tallarand’s sharp ears, and he froze, careful to make no sign. An intruder, here, in his inner sanctuary, having apparently slipped past all his defenses. A host of thoughts raced through his mind, a series of calculations, trying to gauge who would have the ability and the need to take such a risk, and he suddenly realized the answer lay right before him in one of the articles on the desk.
Calmly, he turned in the direction of the sound and said, “Good evening, Adella. And of what service might I be to you this night?”
An instant of silence, and then as if by magic, a young woman stepped from the shadows around the bookcase, coming forward a few steps, just enough for the light to glint off fair skin and sky-blue eyes.
“Good evening, Tallarand,” she answered. “I had a matter of business to discuss with you, and I’m afraid I found it difficult to get a formal appointment.”
The woman was dressed in leather armor, and there was some kind of fine black fabric hanging around her shoulders, a hood, no doubt, to keep her skin from glinting in the darkness. There was no sign of a weapon, but Tallarand was absolutely certain that Bloodseeker would appear in her hands the moment any threat was made.
“I also thought you might appreciate a real check of your defenses,” she added softly.
The woman’s sheer audacity made him smile. Hidden only inches from his hands were the triggers which could immediately unleash half a dozen forms of death upon any intruder as well as summoning his guards a few seconds later, and his fingers rubbed lightly on the desk, itching to make that final test. For the cost of, at most, a few underlings, he stood a chance to gain Bloodseeker and anything else the woman might be carrying on her person. I may well have to face her some day, he told himself as his fingers slipped a fraction closer to the triggers. Why not now, here, on my terms?
A Rage in the Heavens (The Paladin Trilogy Book 1) Page 22