Lost Covenant: A Widdershins Adventure

by Ari Marmell

  He was out cold almost before his fingers had even begun scrabbling at her arm.

  “Is it horrible,” she asked the little god as she removed Cyrille's borrowed sword belt and began looping it around his chest as a harness, “that part of me enjoyed that?”

  Then, at his answer, Widdershins said, “Fine, then I'll live with being horrible,” and stuck her tongue out at the empty room.

  When she finally staggered to the window with her companion roughly and precariously strapped to her back, it was Olgun—despite his earlier confidence—who made the obvious suggestion.

  “No.” She didn't even take a moment to think about it. “I'm not leaving anyone else behind.”

  The climb, it turned out, was very nearly a moot point. Shins spent several pulse-pounding moments trying to squeeze through the window. Every time she tried, some part or other of her floppy passenger snagged on the frame, either dragging her to a halt or threatening to yank one or both of them free of the makeshift harness. His knuckles were skinned and bruised from her multiple failed attempts, and she'd accidentally whacked his head once or twice; she was already dripping with sweat despite the cold, her neck and back beginning to ache.

  Finally, with an awkward twist that threatened to send her toppling from the window before she was able to find a grip on the wall outside, she managed—barely—to wriggle through, Cyrille squeezed up into the upper right corner, Shins the lower left.

  For a moment, she protruded from the wall, a tired and wobbly flagpole, the extra weight on her back threatening to drag her over and down. Way, way down. The wind couldn't possibly have grown so much stronger and so much colder than it had been earlier, but it felt as though the world was attempting to blow her out like a candle.

  Crevices between bricks, gaps in the mortar, cracks in the stone. To Widdershins's fingers and toes, these were normally as good as a ladder, or even better. Not only climbing, but scurrying side to side to make a cockroach envious, even hanging upside down, there wasn't much she couldn't do—wasn't much she hadn't done—with Olgun's aid.

  Normally, however, she wasn't trying to balance a dead weight, heavier than she was, hanging from her shoulders by a single strap around his own.

  Every muscle in her body burned, trembled, partly with strain, partly with the full power Olgun could muster. He couldn't manage it long; already, she felt exhaustion seeping through her, and recognized that not all of it was hers. Then again, she couldn't handle it long, either. Everything throbbed.

  Tentatively, hesitantly, she let herself hang lower, supporting herself on her fingers and one foot, seeking purchase with the other. She hadn't climbed anything this slowly, this fearfully, since she'd scaled the cracked and dilapidated fountain near her parents’ apartment.

  That had been only a few weeks before the fire.

  Right, because that was the most comforting thought to have in her head right now….

  The tip of a boot slid into a cranny that few other people would have even seen. Stiff, tense fingers forced themselves free of one brick to clamp tight around the next. Her jaws clenched, the winds whipped her hair across her face. Cyrille groaned and seemed to slip with every move, nearly jerking her from the wall. Her progress was parceled out in increments of pain, rather than distance. Her whole body trembled, hard enough to send bits of old mortar sifting out from beneath raw and cracking fingertips.

  All of it on instinct, for after the first yard or so, her mind had room for only a single idea, over and over, repeating like the call of a dying bird.

  I'm not going to make it. Oh, gods, I'm not going to make it….

  An inch. A foot. The tiniest of footholds, the most precarious of grips. Jaws, fingers, gut clenched tight enough to crush rock. Her ears rang; her vision was swallowed whole by the wall before her. No world, no up or even down. No thought, no memory—even, finally, no fear, perhaps no Widdershins at all. Just rote, instinctive need. Over and over, an endless, desperate repetition, its purpose long forgotten.

  An inch. A foot. The tiniest of footholds, the most precarious of grips.

  An inch. A foot.

  A window.

  At first, Shins panicked. She didn't even recognize it for what it was, only that it interrupted the routine that had become the entirety of her existence. The shock almost cost her a handhold, and infinite seconds passed in a mad scramble before she felt even remotely secure, more until she'd gotten Cyrille to cease swaying.

  Panic again, when it all came back to her. Given how difficult it'd been to maneuver the two of them out…How the frogs do I get us in through the window?!

  The answer, eventually, proved to be even more awkward than earlier. Shins managed to climb below the window then back up, planting her elbows on the frame and slowly tugging and wriggling until Cyrille slithered off her back into the room. The harness dragged her with him, which proved helpful, and threatened to cut into her arms and shoulders, which was rather less so.

  The result, however, was a final desperate skitter, and then Shins followed her companion into the room—and flopped to the floor beside him, equally limp.

  She had never, in her life, been so exhausted, so worn. Stars danced across the ceiling, and she was too tired even to try blinking them away. Gods, even seeing or listening sounded exhausting!

  It came over her slowly, flowing through her body; she felt warm, almost buoyant. The pain faded, the fatigue dulled, though it still chewed on, a spiritual pack of wolves. For long moments she lay still, giving herself, and Olgun, as long to recover as she could.

  She felt better, and she was grateful for it—but not as much better as she'd have hoped.

  “How long can we keep this up?” she asked softly.

  Olgun's reply was confident, reassuring—and also so deathly tired that she briefly felt his exhaustion overwhelm her own.

  “That long, huh?” Widdershins groaned all the way to her feet. A quick look revealed yet another empty room (at this point, she more than half assumed the entire tower was decades out of use), and whole constellations of footprints in the dust. The Crows had been here already, searched and moved on. Good.

  Widdershins tottered over to Cyrille, knelt beside him, and began lightly slapping his cheeks.

  “What the hell!”

  He all but burst into waking, shoving Shins away from him hard before rolling over to vomit copiously into the corner. Shins herself landed on her rear end a few feet away, wincing at both the sting and the growing acrid miasma.

  “What is wrong with you?!” His voice was rough, gravelly, but more than intelligible. “I said I didn't want—!”

  “Oh, shut it! You're alive! I know you're alive, because you're making way too much noise for a nice, peaceful corpse. You wouldn't be if you'd stayed. You're welcome, by the way. No big deal. It wasn't the hardest thing I've ever done, just somewhere in the top one!”

  “You had no right!”

  “Right?! So I should have just left you—”

  From the window, a third fusillade of gunfire sounded from atop the wall.

  “Pick this up later?” she asked softly.

  “Yeah.”

  With the Crows scouring the upper levels of the tower—after all, the two fugitives couldn't possibly have gotten past them!—Shins and Cyrille had no difficulty in returning once more to the second floor and the balcony overlooking the banquet hall.

  The box of flintlock balls still sat on the table—but only the box. Apparently, the multiple reloads had exhausted its contents.

  Maline stood beside it, his breathing a bit heavy; apparently he'd only just come from the long staircase himself. Most of the hostages Shins could see were either stone-faced or weeping openly. Surely, by now, none of them had the slightest doubt what fate probably awaited them.

  “That food just doesn't smell as appetizing as it did,” Cyrille noted. Widdershins turned his way, blinked twice, and went back to studying the room.

  Once again, after a few moments, Josce showed up
with a box, placing it upon the table and collecting the old one, then conversing briefly with Maline.

  “I'm going,” Widdershins hissed.

  “Going?”

  “Staring at Maline until he decides to drag another group upstairs isn't going to tell us anything. So I need to follow Josce, yes?”

  “You mean we do,” Cyrille corrected.

  “No. You don't have the stealth for—”

  “I can be sneaky. And I'm not letting you go alone.” He crossed his arms, a gesture that was probably intended to convey determination but just made him appear melodramatic.

  “We don't have time to argue this!”

  “Precisely.”

  Aaargh! “Fine! You stay at least half a corridor behind me, and you do not move up until I signal you to! Understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Grumble.

  Pauvril's plethora of stairs made it quick and easy for them to return to the first floor some distance away, then make a quick return to the banquet hall. A side passage, branching off the main corridor that led from the grand chamber back into the depths of the castle, provided a nice, shadowed vantage point. Widdershins had all but vanished in the gloom; she watched a couple of the Crows, along with Josce—carrying his empty box—stroll past without so much as a glance in her direction.

  She gave them a slow count of ten and then slipped out to follow, waving for Cyrille to follow her in kind.

  The sounds of the banquet hall faded, as did the lingering smell of the kitchen beside it. Josce led them through a major corridor, and then a far smaller one, moving ever farther into the rearmost confines of Pauvril. Shins stopped seeing staircases after a time and realized they must have moved beyond the upper levels, to a portion of the keep with only a single floor.

  And then she stopped, whispering bitterly to herself and Olgun both, when she realized this might be as far as she'd get.

  Her quarry had entered a room with three unevenly spaced exits, essentially a lowercase “y” with a broad chamber at the intersection. It wasn't that they'd lost her; she could see and hear signs of movement from the rightmost of the two branches. No, it was that almost half a dozen members of the Thousand Crows waited in that room, standing sentry, and showed no sign of planning to leave anytime soon.

  “Trouble,” Cyrille guessed when she came back to meet him, rather than waving him forward. It clearly wasn't a question.

  “Guard Crows,” she muttered.

  “A lot?”

  “Too many for my comfort. Even if we could put them down, it only takes one to sound an alert. Frogs and figs! Let's get back a ways and think about this.”

  Knowing it to be a reasonable spot to hide, the pair backtracked to the same side passage in which they'd waited just a few moments before. At which point, they stood and looked at one another, constantly starting one suggestion or another, constantly stopping themselves when they spotted this or that flaw in this or that idea.

  So wrapped up were they, neither of them noticed the growing commotion in the nearby banquet hall until they heard the resounding slam of the castle's main door. Both froze, listening intently—Widdershins far more effectively, thanks to Olgun's aid.

  “There's more of them,” she whispered.

  “More of who?”

  “The Crows. The reeve gave in!”

  Cyrille shrugged. “Didn't have much choice. Besides, they're still trapped here for—”

  “Where's Maline?! Let me speak with Maline!” The shout was loud enough that even Cyrille heard it clearly. It was certainly loud enough for Widdershins to recognize the voice.

  Not just the Thousand Crows, then. The reeve delivered Lazare Carnot, too.

  “Evening, Lazare. Excuse me, Lord Carnot.” Shins could practically feel the oil on Maline's words from here.

  “Explain to me,” the patriarch demanded, “how this mess happened!”

  “Oh, that's easy. I made the mistake of trusting the promises of a spineless aristocrat.”

  Widdershins scarcely even flinched when she heard the shot. She'd practically been expecting it.

  “Carry him up and dump him with the next group,” Maline ordered his thugs. “No sense wasting a body.”

  Now what does that mean?

  “The rest of you,” he continued, “we need to speed this up. Start gathering the next group.”

  Gods…

  “They got what they wanted,” Cyrille whispered, shaking. “Why don't they stop?”

  “There's more going on here, I told you that,” she replied, her tone distant.

  “Shins, we can't let this go on!”

  No. Gods help me, we can't. “Olgun?”

  She almost broke down and wept at the sorrow in his agreement.

  “Come on,” she said dully, gesturing for Cyrille to follow.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To stop this,” she answered, wondering with an almost despairing calm how much of herself she might have just killed with her decision. “However we have to.”

  When Widdershins again approached the chamber with three exits and five Crows, it looked as though nothing whatsoever had changed.

  That was untrue. Widdershins had changed.

  The young woman was no stranger to bloodshed. She'd taken lives; one of them earlier that same day. She had always regretted it, and it had always, always been her last resort.

  When she hurled herself into that room that night, with all the speed Olgun could bestow, Widdershins set out to kill.

  They'd been watching for trouble, of course; they stood guard, after all. But they hadn't anticipated it, and certainly not as fast as it appeared. Widdershins leapt, spun, her blade a flickering serpent's tongue of steel. Two of the thugs fell, dead or dying—one pierced through the heart, one with a slit-and-gaping throat—before they could so much as draw a weapon.

  Shins didn't even attempt to stop and change direction. Three more steps carried her straight to the wall; a foot planted on it sent her hurtling back the other way. The third collapsed as she slammed into him, the wind knocked from lungs and the flintlock from his hands. Shins thrust herself off him with one leg, dropping—stretching, nearly diving—into an almost inhumanly extended lunge. Barely two inches of her blade punched through flesh and muscle, between ribs, but that was enough to puncture a second heart.

  Four of the five sentries were down in less time than it took the Crow with his throat slashed to bleed out.

  The last one standing, shaking and pale, had his flintlock out and aimed. Again, Shins couldn't afford to have Olgun trigger it; the noise itself would ruin everything. So would the shout for help the Crow was even then preparing to utter, inhaling deeply through parted lips.

  Shins tossed her rapier—to him, not at him. It sailed in a casual arc, coming at him blade up, handle in easy reach.

  Puzzled instinct accomplished the rest.

  His eyes flickered to the sword; his flintlock wavered as he reached with his free hand to catch the weapon. In that tiny flicker of distraction, Shins had crossed the distance between them, wrapped both her hands around the one he'd used to catch the sword, and shoved the tip of the weapon up and aside, slashing him just beneath his jaw.

  She retrieved her blood-spattered rapier, then turned at the sound of a pained groan. Body rigid, she approached the one man she'd bowled over. He rolled over as she approached, staring at her in undiluted horror.

  He was down. He was beaten. Gods, she could smell from paces away that he'd lost control of his bladder.

  But he could also still scream, if she let him.

  Stiff as rigor mortis and mechanical as clockwork, Widdershins lifted her blade and ran the fallen man through.

  For a long while she stood, sword extended, eyes empty. Slowly, even gracefully, she withdrew the blade, knelt to wipe it free of blood on the dead man's sleeve, and rose once more. With great deliberateness, she slid the weapon home in its sheath at her side.

  Then, and only then, did she feel the
wetness on her cheek. A tear she hadn't known she'd shed? A dribble of dead man's blood? It didn't matter which, really; once her thoughts turned down the path, she couldn't rein them back. She froze. She fought. And then she fell to the stone floor, knees pressed to her chest, bloody hands wrapped around them, and started to sob.

  “Shins? Widdershins? You need to get up!” She heard and recognized each individual word, but couldn't seem to put them together into any unified meaning. She felt her cheek grow warmer, wetter; still couldn't tell from blood or tears, still couldn't bring herself to care.

  “Shins, please! We need you!”

  Along with the words from without came a surge of emotion and imagery from within. The emotions were calm. Comforting. The images were anything but. She saw Brock, lying in an alley with the rest of the trash, herself fully prepared to end him then and there had she not been stopped. The servants of the twisted Apostle of Cevora, dying hideously, cursed by the idol of the Shrouded God—a curse Shins had manipulated them into unleashing. Herself, again, dueling a pair of Finders in the employ of Bishop Sicard, falsifying a supernatural threat that later turned very real; neither of the two had died that night, but Shins had always known that was a near thing.

  Street fights in her youth. Duels with rival thieves. Her clash with Lisette Suvagne, which she'd walked away from neither knowing nor caring whether the taskmaster would survive.

  None of it mattered. None of it made one iota of difference. Because in every single instance, either trouble had come to her, or she'd stumbled into a situation where she was truly down to her final option.

  Never before in her life had she set out with murder as her objective—let alone the murder of five.

  They were the enemy. They would have killed her, given half the chance. It wasn't for them that Widdershins wept.

  She felt pressure on her shoulder and was only vaguely cognizant that it was a hand. “You had to, Shins,” Cyrille told her softly. “For everyone back there. For my family, for me.”

  It sounded good. She wanted to believe it, even knew on some level it was true. It didn't help. Her heart refused to listen to anything her head had to say. The people she might save were abstract, unreal. The corpses around her, those were inalterable truth. She was cracked in two, pain bubbling up in an endless fountain. She shook, she cried, and she truly believed it might never, ever stop.