The Sword-Edged blonde elm-1

by Alex Bledsoe

  “Uh-huh,” I agreed with a doubtful smile. I was too intoxicated with her flesh myself to really pursue my skepticism, though. When we finished-or rather, when I finished-we lay together, her atop me, and I wondered if Cathy had actually occupied this same spot. It certainly explained her behavior when she returned to the village.

  Finally Epona bent over the edge of the bed and retrieved a fresh bottle of wine. She pulled the cork with her teeth and said, “So did I finish telling you about Andrew Reese?”

  “You said he finally found you, and that he was broken to pieces,” I said. “And he sent you an old horseshoe that meant something important.”

  “It means the end. Of all this. It has to be this way, and even though I know it, I can’t help feeling sad. People see so little of the universe.” She held her thumb and forefinger slightly apart to indicate our narrow vision. “There’s always so much pain, so much fear before you realize how vast existence really is. I wish I could spare you that.”

  “Can’t you? Aren’t you a goddess?”

  She nodded, and to be honest, at the time I was ready to believe her. “But I tell ya, Eddie. It’s hard being a goddess and a woman. Maybe I should’ve picked one or the other.” She took a drink. “Next time, baby. Next time.”

  I didn’t know what she meant, but I sure caught the ominous undertone. Suddenly I recognized that slight tang that permeated beneath all the other odors in the place, especially on Epona’s breath. I picked up the cork from the wine she’d just opened and sniffed it.

  I sat up. “Eppie, this wine is poisoned.”

  She sighed. “I know.”

  When she turned up the bottle, I knocked it from her hands. It shattered on the floor. I grabbed her by her shoulders. She felt paper-thin, sandcastle-fragile. “Eppie, everyone in the village is drinking this!”

  Again she sighed. “I know.”

  I jumped off the bed and scrambled for my clothes. Eppie rolled onto her stomach and watched me. Her words rang in my ears: It’s too late for Cathy. It means the end of all this.

  “You can’t help anybody,” she said. She sounded groggy now. “They’re all dead. I will be soon, too. We’ll pass through the veil together, my folk and I.”

  The last thing I heard her say as I ran out the door was, “Such plans, Eddie. I had such plans! ”

  TWENTY

  I ran as hard as I could back down the trail. I heard neither horses nor birds over Epona’s words rolling around in my head.

  A bright orange glow appeared above the treetops, far brighter than the torches had been. At last, so winded I could barely see, I reached the edge of the forest and beheld what was left of the village.

  It looked like an efficient, brutal army had been at work. All the cottages were burning. Bodies lay on the ground, most unmarked, but some decapitated. There was no discrimination: women and children had been butchered as thoroughly as men.

  I knelt beside the closest body and turned it over. It was a man of about forty, with short hair and a paunch. His face was contorted in pain, and black foam collected at the corners of his mouth. The poisoned wine had taken him.

  The roof of Betty’s little not-a-tavern collapsed in a big puff of sparks. My chest was on fire, too, from all that running, and from the agony of realizing Cathy had to be among the dead.

  Unless…

  I had to know. I ran through the village, heedless of the heat and danger. “Cathy!” I yelled. I dodged chickens and goats, free of their pens and frantically seeking shelter or escape. I did not look at the other corpses except to make sure they weren’t her. I saw familiar faces-the red-haired girl who owed me a kiss had also died from poison-but sought only one. “Cathy!”

  “Give it up, hoss,” a voice called.

  I turned. Stan Carnahan, bare-chested and blood-spattered, stood between two burning buildings like he’d been molded from the flames. If he’d been intimidating before, now he was downright terrifying. He looked capable of ripping a bull in half with only his hands. He carried a sword- my sword-also stained with blood. And he was smiling.

  “The ones the poison didn’t get, I’ve already seen to,” he continued casually. “There’s nobody left alive here.”

  Despite the pain in my chest from running, I managed to say, “You couldn’t have killed everyone.”

  “Yes, I could,” he said, propping the sword on his shoulder. Blood dripped from the blade and hissed when it hit a fallen burning crossbeam. “I’ve been planning this for months. Even made a list so I wouldn’t forget anyone. Every person in the village is accounted for.”

  We looked at each other for a long moment. I couldn’t just ask him about Cathy, so I chose the next obvious question. “Why?”

  “Same as you. Andrew Reese paid me.”

  That name, and the insidious rhyme, whirled through my head.

  “He told me a year ago to come here, become part of the community and wait for delivery messengers to show up. When that happened, kill everyone in town. Simple job, really. And the pay was unbelievable.”

  He’d poisoned the wine, and on a night of celebration only the children and a few teetotalers would have been spared. They evidently posed no challenge, for Carnahan wasn’t even breathing hard. “Simple job,” I repeated.

  Another building collapsed. Neither of us looked at it. My pulse returned to normal, then continued to slow, as panic and horror dissolved into cold soldierly professionalism. I saw no reason to delay any longer. “Did you kill Cathy, too?”

  He nodded, almost contritely. “She was asleep in the bathtub. It was quick.”

  Now I was on territory I knew well. He was bigger, and stronger, and better armed, with my own sword no less. But I’d taken on worse odds before.

  I let my jacket fall to the ground. After Eppie’s hut, and my mad run, and the heat from the burning village, I was drenched in sweat. Yet inside I was solid ice.

  Carnahan lowered the sword into a casual defensive stance. I wouldn’t catch him on overconfidence. “No reason you can’t walk away from here,” he said. “I told you being with Epona was the safest place. You weren’t in the village, so I got no beef with you. My job is done.”

  I knelt and drew the knife from the side of my boot. It was only about seven inches long, but it would be enough. I flipped it casually in my hand. “Mine’s not.”

  I threw the knife accurately at his heart. I was good, as our dart game would’ve warned him, so he was ready and batted it easily aside with the sword. But he never saw the second knife, a mere three inches long, that I had secretly slipped out of a second hidden sheath and threw a moment after the first.

  He almost avoided it, though. I misjudged the strength of his parry, so he moved more than I thought. The second knife went right by his head, ineffectually I thought at first.

  Then I saw the first jet of blood from the big vein in the side of his neck. He had no idea he’d even been hit at first, until he felt the hot fresh blood spray down onto his shoulder and arm. By the time he put his hand to the wound, a quarter of his blood had shot into the darkness in ever-weakening arcs.

  He fell to his knees and dropped my sword. I did not approach him. Blood shot through the fingers pressed against his neck. He said nothing, but I never saw any hatred in his eyes. He was a pro to the end.

  When he finally collapsed, I sat and waited until I saw no fresh blood shining in the firelight. It took a while. By then most of the fires had burned down to glowing ruins, and their pops and hisses filled the night.

  Finally I stood, retrieved my sword and neatly beheaded Stan’s corpse. Always pay the insurance.

  The only person I buried was Cathy, in a shallow grave with no marker. I found her charred-boiled, really-body still in the metal tub inside one of the ruined buildings. Her unburned head lay on the ground outside. I put the rest of the corpses on the most active fire, and kept it going until they’d been consumed. The smell was as appalling as it sounds.

  At dawn, I returned to Epona’s cotta
ge. No horses followed me through the forest. No weird birds sang overhead. The house was exactly as I’d left it, but the woman-whoever she’d been-was gone. Perhaps the poisoned wine had driven her into the forest to die. I didn’t know, and didn’t really care. I considered torching the place, but I’d seen enough destruction to do me for a while.

  NowI sat in the silent ruins of the cottage, the odor of burning flesh once more in the air. The dark-haired woman who once faced me here, who had become my lover and burrowed so far into my head that even now my skin tingled at the memory of her touch, had claimed to be a goddess. Her blond, blue-eyed twin now claimed to be a victim. I didn’t believe either of them, but the only way to get at the truth seemed to be buying into those delusions. Someone once hated Epona Gray enough to commit a massacre. If Epona really was Rhiannon, could this someone also be behind the disappearance of her son?

  Andrew Reese is broken to pieces.

  “Eppie,” I said to the air, “I sure wish you were here right now. I could use the advice of a goddess.”

  A tiny bird sat atop one pile of debris and, just as I registered its presence in the corner of my eye, flew off into the woods. It seemed to leave the same sparkling trail as the birds I’d glimpsed in Rhiannon’s cell, but I couldn’t swear to it. Its departure dislodged the deer antler it had perched on, which now slid with a soft clatter down the side of the pile. It stopped when it dislodged something else, a small wooden box that traveled the rest of the way to land at the bottom with a thump that dislodged the lid. An object fell out with a solid, heavy thud.

  I stared at the box, weathered and decayed but still obviously the one Cathy had carried, and the tarnished, rusted horseshoe that fell from it. “You have got to be kidding,” I said aloud.

  I picked up the box. Still folded in the bottom was a neat piece of vellum that had evidently been treated with something to protect it from the rain, winters and other elements that might cause it to decay over time. I unfolded it slowly and took it to the door so I could examine it in the light.

  The language was familiar Boscobelian, although the handwriting was atrocious. The text was obvious and, for the moment, inconsequential. But the name at the bottom gave me what I most needed at that moment.

  The signature read, ANDREW REESE.

  Andrew Reese is broken to pieces.

  And my pieces were now falling into place. Cathy told me she’d been hired in Boscobel, and this was written in its language. I now knew my next step.

  I got sudden chills. The chances of finding such a blatant clue after all this time were almost enough to make me buy into divine intervention. Perhaps another goddess heard my prayer and answered it out of professional courtesy.

  I jumped as something moved within the pile of bones and sent several clattering to the ground. A big rat poked its head into the light, squeaked at me and withdrew. The disturbance had revealed a human skull, split along the top by a jagged crack. It seemed to laugh silently at me.

  I carefully placed the note in my pocket; I’d have plenty of time to think it over on my way to Cape Querna. It wasn’t a short voyage.

  I glanced up in time to see another bird flit away from a windowsill. Once again I might have imagined it, but it seemed, for a moment, to leave a glittering trail through the air.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Andrew Reese?” Bernie Teller repeated thoughtfully. “Reese, Reese… no, don’t know the name.” Two weeks after I found the note in Epona’s ruined hut, I sat in Commander Bernard Teller’s Cape Querna office on a bright summer day. City noises filled the air outside, but since Bernie’s digs were on the sixth floor, we were literally above it all. He reclined with his feet on his desk, his long official sword propped against the end. He was as lean and alert as I remembered. “What sort of guy is he?” he asked.

  “Never met him,” I said. “Right now he’s just a name related to a case I’m working on. Don’t know his age, his nationality, anything. But I know he was here thirteen years ago. And he might be… deformed.”

  “Deformed,” Bernie repeated.

  “Or handicapped from an injury.”

  “Hm. And you said wealthy?”

  “Wealthy enough that he paid a hired killer to spend eleven months in the Ogachic Mountains waiting for his victim to show up.”

  Bernie idly pulled on his left earlobe, a gesture that meant he was thinking. After a moment he said, “Hang on. I want somebody else to hear this.”

  While he was gone, I looked around his immaculate office, only slightly less austere than my own. In one corner stood a shelf with a few legal scrolls. A small painting of Boscobel’s Queen Dorothea hung next to it; on the wall behind me was a detailed canvas map of Cape Querna. Through the window I saw, over the intervening roofs, the mast tops of ships anchored in the harbor. This high, the breeze was brisk and clean, with only a hint of salty tang. The harbor city was Bernie’s domain now, and he seemed to have it well in hand. At the very least, he’d forced the panhandlers, beggars and other entrepreneurial refuse off the street, and that had made a huge quality-of-life difference.

  I first served under Bernie for three months during the trapper skirmishes fifteen years earlier, between the time I left Arentia and the day I met Cathy Dumont. He had the career soldier’s typical disdain for mercenaries like me, but once we got past that we discovered similar views on women, money, politics and our jobs. The next time we fought together, a couple of years after Cathy’s death, we were both captains, and staged an elaborate ambush for which I let him take the credit. Since going solo I’d dropped into Cape Querna whenever I could, and he’d occasionally sent business my way, as he’d done with the missing Princess Lila. We had not spoken in three years, and the last time I saw him he’d still been a stubbly, rough-edged army major who did not play the political games that gained you higher rank. So either he’d changed, which seemed unlikely, or he’d been sponsored by someone who recognized his integrity as something sorely needed in the notoriously corrupt Civil Security Force. Either way, I was certain that beneath the clean-shaven, smoothed-out and well-groomed exterior the same relentless scruples still thrived.

  When he returned, he preceded a uniformed officer with unruly white hair and the unmistakable build of a man used to physical confrontation. “Eddie LaCrosse, this is Leonard Saye.”

  I shook hands with the newcomer. “Nice to meet you.”

  “He’s been a street officer here for twenty years,” Bernie said, “and he knows everybody.”

  “I know of everybody,” Saye corrected. He sized me up in a glance. “You’re from Arentia, aren’t you? You still have a hint of the accent.”

  “Long time ago,” I said flippantly. “Sheer accident of birth.”

  “So I guess you’ve been following their big scandal?”

  I shook my head. “Don’t pay much attention to gossip.”

  “Well, your King Philip sentenced Queen Rhiannon to life in prison for killing their son. Said she deserved to die, but he wouldn’t change the law just for her.”

  Attaboy, Phil, I thought. “Reckon she deserved it, then.”

  “But get this,” Leonard continued. “She’s not in prison, or even in that big tower. She’s locked up in a public cell, right at the main city gate. Every day she has to sit outside and let people call her names, spit on her, anything as long as they don’t hurt her. She’s like an animal in a cage.” He shook his head. “Can you beat that?”

  “They say revenge is the sport of kings,” I said with a blase shrug. Inside, though, I was both glad and apprehensive. He’d done what I wanted-punished the queen publicly, so that word would get back to whomever had framed her-but I also knew he must be in agony, losing both his wife and child while simultaneously knowing she was innocent and his son might be alive.

  One of my most vivid memories of Phil was of the time when he was nine years old and had to put down his favorite old hunting dog, Rosie. As the crown prince, he knew all the other kids would be watching, so Phil put on
the bravest face possible. He said a properly dignified goodbye to the crippled old girl before he dispatched her with one quick, lethal arrow. Later, though, he cried privately for hours. He told me that if he’d just been able to explain to Rosie what was about to happen, he would’ve been fine. But seeing the love and trust in the dog’s eyes, and that instant of betrayal when the arrow hit home, was too much. What he endured now must make that childhood trauma feel like a mosquito bite.

  “What can I do for you?” Saye asked, bringing me back to the moment.

  “Ever heard of Andrew Reese?” I asked. Inwardly I gritted my teeth against that damned rhyme.

  Saye thought for a moment. “No. Who is he?”

  “I have no idea. Thirteen years ago he was rich enough to hire a real top-of-the-line sword jockey to kill someone.”

  “Who? The killer, I mean.”

  “Stan Carnahan.”

  Saye’s eyes widened and he let out a long, low whistle. “Wow. That name takes me back.”

  “Told you he’d know,” Bernie said.

  “Stan was the top dog in hired swords before he disappeared. In his own way, he was the most honest guy I ever met. We used to swap shots between drinks or drinks between shots, whichever you like.” Saye shook his head in admiration. “Always wondered what happened to him.”

  “He was a pro to the end,” I said, all the explanation Saye needed. “Who would’ve hired him back then?”

  Saye thought for a moment. “Big Joe Vincenzo was around. The Soberlin brothers. Kee Kee Vantassel was on the rise. Nobody else could’ve afforded him.”

  “Any of them deformed?”

  Saye frowned in surprise. “Deformed how?”

  I wondered how to paraphrase Epona’s words so they didn’t sound goofy. “His arms and legs would’ve been kind of… pushed up into his body. It would make him short, and it’d be hard for him to move around, I’m guessing.”