Dragoslav darted in; slapping Aniston’s thrust out wide with his dagger. Inside Aniston’s reach, he jabbed the hunting knife toward his gut. Aniston stepped back and sucked in his stomach, but he was too slow. He felt the blade pierce his flesh. His hasty dodge saved him from an immediately mortal wound, but his leg collapsed, and he once again found himself on the ground.
Aniston shuffled backward, scooting on his hands and backside. Dragoslav walked after him with slow, measured steps, leering and enjoying the fear Aniston wore on his face. Aniston felt his back butt up against something solid. He used the stone bridge railing to help hoist himself back to his feet.
“Nowhere to go now, boy.”
Aniston glanced over the rail to the roiling water below. The canal was normally shallow and sedate, but the rain had fueled it into a swift flow.
“There’s one place left to go, Zeegers, and I’ll be waiting for you when you get there. See you in hell.”
Aniston rolled over the railing. He was weightless for a second that seemed to drag on as he plummeted the thirty feet to the water below. He hit the water at a less than optimal angle and felt his left knee blow out and the bones in his lower leg break. He reached the stones beneath the torrent an instant later and held onto consciousness just long enough to experience the agony of his right femur snapping like a twig.
The impact drove what little air he had in his lungs out of his mouth in a gurgling scream of bubbles. He bounced along the bottom of the canal as the current carried his body downstream. With his last vestiges of strength and coherence, Aniston used his arms to claw his way to the surface. He gasped in a lungful of the sweetest air he had ever experienced.
The current carried him toward a bend in the canal, and he forced his arms to move. Aniston’s dazed strokes looked more as if he was trying to slap out a fire than swim, but he inched closer to the shore. He felt a surge of hope when his useless legs dragged on the rocky bed below the water. His hands found purchase a minute later, and he crawled onto the shore just far enough to rest his head out of the water.
Aniston rolled onto his back, his head lying on the stones lining the canal as his legs bobbed in the water. He lacked the strength to pull himself any higher. If it continued to rain, the water level would likely rise and carry him away. It was now a contest to see if he would drown or bleed to death.
Lightning flashed, and he stared up into a hooded face as it looked down at him.
“I warned you that Garran Holt would be the instrument of your demise.”
Aniston fought to place the voice and focus through his fading vision to capture the speaker’s face. “Dean Kelsey?”
Of all the faces he expected to see on his deathbed, Dean Kelsey’s had not been one of them. He shuddered, closed his eyes, and let the blackness take him.
CHAPTER 24
Adam opened his eyes and clamped them back shut when the sun assaulted them. He parted the lids to slits and let them adjust to the intrusive light before opening them further. He propped himself onto his elbows and found Garran tending a small campfire.
“Where are we?” Adam asked in a raspy voice.
“Afternoon, Sunshine,” Garran answered far too chipperly. “We’re about half a day’s ride into Opatia.”
“How’d we get here?”
“I tied you into the saddle last night…well, very early this morning. You raised quite a ruckus, so I figured it would be best if we lit out before true morning.”
Adam licked his lips and tried to chase the dryness from his mouth with his tongue. “Ugh, I feel awful.”
“You look as though you just licked a beggar’s ass,” Garran responded with a laugh.
“Why don’t you look as terrible you usually do?”
“I kept it pretty tame last night. I figured I should stay sober and look after you so you didn’t get into too much trouble.”
“Thanks. I guess it is best that I don’t drink. I definitely do not have the stomach or the head for it.”
Garran bobbed his head from side to side. “Well…I may have helped you along just a bit.”
Adam pushed himself into a sitting position. “You did what?”
“I know how uptight you are, so I put something in your drink to help you grow a pair.”
“You drugged me?” Adam shouted, too angry to notice the pain it caused his throbbing head. “Garran, I have taken vows to live a life of peace and to treat my body as if it was a holy vessel. You defiled me with whatever vile toxin you put in my drink! I have put up with a lot of abysmal behavior from you, but this is by far the worst thing you have done since we met.”
“Shows what you know. That isn’t even the worst thing I did last night.” Garran scoffed. “There you go again, underestimating me.”
“What did you do?” Adam asked, his voice low and threatening.
“Wrong question.”
“What the hell is the right question?”
Garran pointed at Adam with the stick he was using to poke a burning log. “What did you do?”
Adam leapt to his feet, his hands clenched into fists. “What did you do, you sonofabitch?”
“Well, I guess you priests don’t take vows against being a potty mouth.”
“What. Did. You. Do?”
“Don’t you remember?”
“I recall beating a man half to death. Everything after that is a haze thanks to the drugs you put in me!”
“So you wouldn’t remember doing something like—oh, I don’t know, getting laid?”
“I did what?” Adam advanced, his fists clenched so tightly they shook, his face contorted in barely suppressed fury. He shook his head. “No, you’re lying.”
“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters!”
“What part matters most, the actual act or your perception of it?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You said that, even though I was beyond coherency, I was responsible for any wrong doing that might arise from one of my sexual encounters. Well, now you are the one who may have committed a sexual act with no memory, so who’s at fault now?”
“You! You are at fault!”
“How is it my fault?”
“You drugged me!”
“Your prick, your problem. That pretty much sums up your previous argument.”
Adam’s heart pounded in his chest, and it felt as though someone was squeezing the air from his lungs. “I need you to tell me the truth. Did I have sex with a woman or not?”
Garran looked askance. “Who said anything about a woman?”
“Garran, if there was some kind of farm animal involved, I swear to God…”
“I would never do anything like that. I know how uptight you are about your vows. I found a loophole…in another hole. That’s better right?”
“No, it’s not better! It is worse! It is so much worse!”
“I don’t know why you are getting so upset. A lot of people pay up to a laborer’s annual income for a high-class bender.”
“Are you even capable of telling the truth? Your moral turpitude aside, where would you get that kind money? I thought we were nearly broke?”
Garran laughed. “We are. No, all the only bender around here looked like a lumberjack in a dress.”
Adam roared and punched Garran in the face. Garran took two steps back and wiped the blood oozing from his split lip.
“Well, look who woke up this morning with her big girl panties on. You want to have a go at me?”
Garran advanced with a series of quick jabs. Adam responded by blocking and deflecting them with smooth, swooping motions of his arms that would have looked comical had they not been so effective. So focused was Garran on breaking through Adam’s defenses, he failed to notice Adam’s foot before it connected with his face.
Garran stumbled back and clamped a hand to the bruise quickly spreading across his cheek. “What the hell was that? I thought you priests were pacif
ists?”
“We are! Ka-Rugh is supposed to be an exercise used to align physical and spiritual balance, but right now, the only thing that is going to bring balance to my heart and mind is kicking your ass!”
“Bring it on, Buttercup!” Garran shouted and charged.
Adam ducked low, grabbed Garran by the wrist, and flipped him over his back onto the ground. Garran groaned and rolled to feet, his fists held before him. He threw a quick series of jabs, darted inside Adam’s whirling defense, and wrapped his hands around his throat.
Adam brought his hands up between Garran’s arms and threw them out wide, breaking his hold. He retaliated with several quick blows to Garran’s midriff, bent forward until his head nearly touched the ground, and hit Garran in the face with a kick that snaked over his back.
Garran stumbled back, dazed. Adam leapt into the air and kicked him in the chest with both feet, sending him flying back to land hard in the dirt. Garran held his hands over his chest and stomach and groaned.
Garran got to his feet and stumbled away. “Sneaky damn priest! You win this this time.”
“What the hell is wrong with you, Garran?” Adam shouted after him. “Every time I start to think you are something other than a degenerate scoundrel, you do something horrible!”
“Yeah, that seems to be a recurring theme for me.”
“God I hate you sometimes!”
Garran nodded. “Me too, kid, me too.”
Garran staggered back to the campfire, slumped to the ground, and stared up at the sky. Adam watched him as he tried to make sense of Garran’s behavior. He stuck his hands down the front of his pants, pulled it back out, and sniffed his fingers.
Adam sat down on a log near the fire. “Why didn’t you transcend?”
Garran turned his head to look at Adam. “What?”
“Why didn’t you transcend? There is no way I could have beaten you if you had.”
“Like you said, I’m kind of retarded in that regard.”
“I don’t believe you. You are as close to sober as I have ever seen you. You let me beat you. Why?”
“Maybe I thought you deserved it—or I did. Whatever.”
“I know I did not have sex with anyone last night, least of all a man.”
“Is that what you think?”
“It is what I know.”
“Then that’s all that really matters, isn’t it? Perception trumps reality. That is the basis for my argument.”
“I think the basis for your argument is to piss me off. I need you to be honest with me so I can understand you.”
“Why would you want to do something like that? I don’t even want to understand me.”
“I live my life by certain moral standards, and I need to know that beneath this shell of degeneracy resides someone I can trust and who shares at least the core of those same values. If you do not, then this is where we part ways.”
Garran sat up. “You will never succeed without me.”
Adam nodded. “You are probably right, but I would rather fail while retaining my honor and values than to succeed by sacrificing them. I know my sister shares those same values, and she loves and respects me enough that she too would rather give up this crusade than for me to do that.”
“Then you and I are two vastly different people.”
“So I have gathered. Every time you show yourself to be a true hero, you deliberately crush any achievements by acting like a complete ass. Are you insane?”
Garran shook his head as he stared up at the sky. “By definition, an insane man wouldn’t know what he was doing.”
“Then why do you put yourself and others through this?”
“Sometimes it’s easier to live up to people’s expectations than to prove them wrong.”
“So you deliberately keep people’s expectations of you as low as you can?”
“That’s what the psychological profilers said at the school.”
“But you say psychological profiling doesn’t work on you.”
“Nope, I’m far too complex a person.”
Adam released an exasperated sigh. “Let’s pretend you are studying a target who behaves just like you. How would you profile his actions? Dissect his life and motivations for me.”
“Well, I would say that he probably had a very dysfunctional home growing up. He probably had a stepfather who enjoyed using him as a whipping post to take out the frustrations of his own failures. He might have had a mother who constantly told him that he was the reason his real father left and that he should be grateful that any man bothered to stick around. I imagine it would be hard on a five-year-old boy to be told that it was his fault that his stepfather beat him and that he deserved it while she was stitching up a gash on his head from a hurled whiskey bottle or rubbing salve on the welts left by his belt buckle.
“I imagine that created deep trust issues within him. After all, if he couldn’t trust the people who should have protected him and placed his welfare above their own, then how could he trust anyone? That sort of fear causes him to keep people at a distance. He feels the need to hurt them before they get a chance to hurt him.
“The constant berating and condemnation makes him crave success while being terrified of failure, because if he tries and fails, then he will prove true everything that everyone thinks and says about him. He thinks it is better to cheat and scheme his way to success rather than to make an honest effort and risk the slightest chance of failing. At least if he is a miserable sot, then he can blame his failure on his turpitude and not because he is, at his core, the worthless human being everyone thinks he is.”
Garran shrugged. “At least that is what I would think, but I’m not one of those head physics.”
“I’m sure glad I’m not that guy,” Adam said quietly.
Garran stood and stretched. “Me too. Now, if I have properly satisfied your womanly need to gossip about the emotions of others, I feel a chill in the air and need to go meditate.”
“Meditate or medicate?”
“It’s all the same thing.”
Adam shook his head as Garran wandered toward the bushes. “Garran, I didn’t really…you know…did I?”
Garran paused and turned back around. “Someone once said that the greatest thing in life is a mystery. It is the flame that brings light to our otherwise dull and tedious existence.”
“Who said that?”
“I don’t know. Some jerk in a book.”
“Damn it, Garran! Don’t make me kick your ass again.”
Garran walked away, smiling. “You only get the first one for free. You have to earn the next.”
Garran found a boulder next to a small stream upon which to sit. He filled the bowl of his pipe with opium, clamped the stem between his teeth, and lit it with a sulfur stick, his hands trembling enough to make the simple task a challenge. He inhaled the smoke and let the drug carry away the roiling emotions battering his soul upon the rocks of his existence. His spiritual sea grew calm once again, and he closed his eyes to enjoy the momentary lull.
CHAPTER 25
Evelyn slept in fits and starts, startling awake every few minutes throughout the night. Aniston had not returned last night, and she feared her nightmares would be born out on the morrow. The sound of the door opening to the living area of her rooms roused her fully awake.
She leapt from her bed and hurried across the room. She threw the door of her bedchamber open, but the smile on her face vanished. Evelyn stood in the doorway, numb and trying to force down the fear and revulsion lodged in her throat.
“Were you expecting someone else?” Martin asked. “Given your little schemes, I imagine you expected anyone other than me. It was quite clever, almost worthy of an agent.”
Martin’s short stay in the cells beneath the palace had obviously not been a pleasant one. He favored his left leg, and his face was a mosaic of bruises and abrasions.
“Where is Aniston?” Evelyn asked, trying to pitch her tone to be as neutral as she could.
“Oh, he is quite dead. I am afraid he met a rather brutal end early this morning, as traitors often do.”
“Aniston was a patriot. It is the usurper wearing my father’s crown and those who put him there who are the traitors!”
Martin shrugged. “I have little interest in politics aside from doing my duty. I do appreciate you sending Aniston off on those errands. It did a splendid job of proving my innocence and securing my release so that I might get back to it. Having been falsely accused and sentenced a second time for something I had not done weighed particularly heavy on my soul.”
“Anyone who sides with The Guild and their murderous lot has no soul!”
“Perhaps, but at least we have our freedom and our lives.” Martin grinned, a haughty gleam his eyes.
Evelyn turned and slammed the door behind her.
“Yes, Highness, do get comfortable. You will be spending a great deal of time in there.”
Evelyn collapsed to her knees next to her bed, buried her face in the covers, and wept.
***
Opatia’s capital of Betham lay cradled in a valley surrounded by towering peaks. Second only to Leva in population, at least for the “civilized” nations, its splendor equaled and even surpassed Anatolia’s grand capital.
Even travelling the new trade road had taken ten days of steady riding through the twisting, rising, and plummeting mountain passes. Garran had wanted to avoid the well-travelled and patrolled highway, but Adam’s argument regarding the preciousness of time had swayed him. Adam’s god-touched gift had managed to allow them to pass the numerous patrols and toll stations without incident.
The only conflict that had arisen was at a customs station when they confiscated Garran’s remaining opium and the laudanum the physic had given him for his injury. Adam doubted that the wound troubled him much as it had scabbed over and knitted together with startling rapidity, but Garran was adamant in his insistence that the potent painkiller was crucial for his recovery. So much so, that Adam was only barely able to prevent him from fighting the entire customs guard force and ruining what had thus far been a trouble-free journey.
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