The Warlord's Legacy

by Ari Marmell

  “Can we go after her?” Irrial asked.

  “Not unless you want to face the entire Cephiran invasion force on our way out of here. If we leave now,” he added with a sickly grin, “we’ll probably only have to dodge about half of it.”

  “Where are we going?” Seilloah asked, leaping into Corvis’s arms as he headed for the flimsy stairs.

  “For now, anywhere that’s not here. After that?” He shrugged, checking his headlong dash just enough to prevent the stairs from collapsing beneath him. “If this conspiracy really does involve some of the Guilds, we’ll have to go to them to find out, won’t we?”

  “Not Mecepheum again!” Irrial protested.

  “Unless we come up with a better idea.” He hit the ground floor and began to run, hoping they could clear the street, hoping they could reach the horses, and the gate …

  Hoping against hope that they could, indeed, come up with a better idea.

  Chapter Seventeen

  JASSION CROSSED THE ENTRYWAY at a deliberate pace, Talon at the ready. The thick carpeting muffled any incidental sounds he might have made, while the sundry tapestries, drapes, and patterns hanging on every available inch of wall throttled to death any potential echoes. Across the room and perhaps two strides back, Mellorin crept in a low crouch, heavy dagger clutched in her fist, a fearsome anticipation writ large on her face.

  And behind them, emitting frustrated sighs like a depressed bellows and making no effort at stealth whatsoever, Kaleb followed.

  “I’m telling you,” he said, giving Jassion a violent start just as the baron had been reaching for the knob on the room’s far door, “he’s not here.”

  Jassion glared, and even Mellorin couldn’t help but cast the sorcerer an exasperated look. “Will you be quiet?” the baron hissed.

  “I rather doubt it. I haven’t so far.”

  “Kaleb …,” Mellorin began, then visibly flinched, wilting at the sorcerer’s glare.

  They’d been passing through Vorringar when they heard the rumors: muttered tales that Rebaine had targeted the Weavers’ Guild of Kevrireun for his latest rampage. Not merely the local Guildmistress, but most of her lieutenants, had been slaughtered in a quartet of vicious attacks—three by axe, one when his entire bedchamber was engulfed in roaring flames. And several times, those rumors claimed, passersby had spotted a towering figure in black-and-bone, lurking nearby immediately after the carnage.

  It was—Jassion had been utterly convinced—the break they were waiting for. “People wouldn’t just make up stories like this,” he’d insisted. “One murder, perhaps, but four?” Even Kaleb’s failure to detect Rebaine’s presence using Mellorin as a focus for his spell hadn’t convinced him otherwise.

  “Isn’t it possible,” the baron had asked, “that he’s found a way to block your ‘blood divination’ even once you’ve gotten close?”

  “With his mastery of magic? I seriously doubt it.”

  “But it can be done?”

  “Anything can be—”

  “Then we go.”

  So they’d gone, traveling several days to the small and slowly dying city of Kevrireun. Missing stones marred the uneven streets; the buildings peeled and sagged like rotting fruit. Carelessly throwing both money and rank around him, Jassion either bribed or cowed witnesses, guards, even government officials into providing every detail of the murders.

  Yes, m’lord, Rebaine had been spotted at two of the scenes.

  No, sir, he’d never attacked his victims in large groups.

  Yes, the victims were all members of the Weavers’ Guild.

  Most of the remaining Guildsmen were now barricaded in their homes, protected by Kevrireun’s ragtag militia. Embran Laphert, now the highest-ranking survivor, had closed down the Guildhouse and told everyone to go home—or into hiding—until further notice.

  Despite Kaleb’s continual protestations, Jassion had determined that investigating the Guildhouse itself was their next step. “Perhaps,” he’d argued, “we can find some hint as to why Rebaine chose these poor fools as his latest targets.” Mellorin, though not so quick to dismiss Kaleb’s arguments, was sufficiently swept up in her uncle’s enthusiasm. Once she’d agreed to go, the sorcerer had grudgingly followed.

  Now they stood within the foyer of the Weavers’ Guild Hall, one of the few such institutions left in Kevrireun. Jassion once more reached for the door, hurling it open and dashing into the hallway beyond. Kaleb irritably circled the room, examining the various tapestries—Mount Derattus doesn’t actually look like that, he noted while passing one particular landscape.

  He knew damn well that these murders weren’t part of the pattern, no matter what the witnesses claimed to have seen. But how to convince the simpleton and the brat without explaining how he knew, that had so far eluded him. Nor was the summons that had been ringing in the confines of his own skull for the past ten minutes, deafening as any church bell, making it any easier to think.

  He expected this sort of nonsense from Jassion, but that Mellorin had gone along with it, had refused to heed his words … His fists trembled in frustrated fury, and the nearest tapestry actually began to smolder around the edges. Seething, his thoughts darker than the armor for which they searched, Kaleb moved to catch up with the others.

  Their exploration took them through workrooms replete with looms and spinning wheels of every conceivable design, including some that hadn’t seen regular use for centuries. Up thickly carpeted stairs they trod, through heavily locked chambers containing a fortune in textiles and rare yarns and intricately woven garb, and finally into a hallway of opulent offices.

  It was here that Jassion insisted they split up, each searching an office for anything even remotely useful. The sorcerer welcomed the opportunity for solitude, however brief, partly to avoid speaking with the baron whose obstinacy was driving him inexorably mad …

  And partly because it finally offered the chance to silence that damn summons, even if it meant turning his attentions toward a different idiot.

  Kaleb slipped into one of the chambers, garishly decorated with an array of mismatched stitchings, and slumped into the thickly upholstered chair behind the desk. “What?” he rasped under his breath.

  “Gods damn it all, Kaleb! I’ve been trying to make contact!”

  “I’m very well aware—Master Nenavar,” he added quickly, as he felt the first stirrings of pain rack his body.

  “I am not accustomed to being ignored.”

  “We can work on that.” Then, before the old coot could grow even more irritated, “I was with the others. Couldn’t get away. Jassion’s a bit dense, but I think even he might notice if I started to talking to myself.”

  Nenavar remained silent. Kaleb leaned back in the chair and propped his feet up on the desk.

  “I assume you had some reason for contacting me other than just wanting to yell at me?”

  “We’ve found him.”

  Kaleb’s feet hit the floor with a resounding thud; he was out of the chair before the echo faded. “What? Where?”

  “He triggered the ward that I ordered placed on Ellowaine. Apparently he finally figured out that she was our initial source of intelligence on him.”

  “He’s in Emdimir, then?”

  “No. Nearby, though.” Kaleb heard the accustomed exasperation in the old voice, but for once it wasn’t directed his way. “It took the Cephiran sorceress who’d been scrying on Ellowaine over an hour to reach me. Godsdamn incompetents. I told Rhykus to let me cast the spell, but no, it had to be one of his people. Military paranoia at its finest.

  “Anyway, the Cephirans are dogging his heels, and even if he enchants the horses again, there’s a limit to how far he can push them. We should be able to maintain at least a general idea of his location. Be ready to move swiftly to intercept; I’ll get back to you when we’re certain which way he’s heading.”

  Kaleb nodded, though he knew Nenavar couldn’t see him. “And what would you like me to tell Baron Tantrum a
nd She-Rebaine?”

  But there was no answer. Nenavar’s presence was gone from his head.

  No worries. He’d find something.

  “I’VE FOUND SOMETHING.”

  Kaleb’s voice in the hallway was enough to conjure Jassion and Mellorin from their own offices. They appeared in twin swirls of parchment, and Kaleb could only shake his head at the detritus they were leaving behind. “It’s a good thing we weren’t trying to be subtle or anything,” he told them. “It looks like you’ve been shearing parchment sheep in there.”

  Mellorin offered a grin that was at least slightly embarrassed, but Jassion—as usual—cared little for Kaleb’s concerns. “You’ve found why Rebaine was interested in these people?”

  “I’ve found an answer,” the sorcerer said, so smugly that even his words seemed to turn up their noses in disdain. He held out a creased sheaf of parchments he’d found (with the aid of a few judicious spells) in the office files. “It appears,” Kaleb told them, “that the late Guildmistress had commissioned a private investigation of her own. You might like to know what she found.” The baron and the warlord’s daughter leaned in, scanning the cramped writing, and when they spoke once more, they spoke as one.

  “Son of a bitch!”

  HALF AN HOUR LATER, THEY STOOD gathered in the living room of a modest house on Kevrireun’s south end. What had once been a low table was now so much kindling, books and scrolls were scattered about the chamber, and one Embran Laphert—a bald, broad-shouldered fellow who currently led the Weavers’ Guild, despite looking like the most unlikely weaver imaginable—hung from the wall, held aloft by Kaleb’s magics. He was clad only in a nightshirt, and couldn’t cease babbling long enough to form coherent speech.

  Neither Jassion nor Mellorin currently had a single glance to spare him. They were too busy marveling at what lay beyond the open door to an inner room.

  “You have got to be joking,” Jassion finally said.

  A small workbench held a large battle-axe with several simplistic but skillful engravings across the blade. Beside it slouched a fat wineskin that smelled, not of wine at all, but of lantern oil.

  And behind that, on a large wooden rack, stood a suit of armor, modeled after the most ornate of knightly plate. It had been coated in a black lacquer, the breastplate and spaulders adorned with a few shafts of what appeared, up close, to be iron painted ivory white. To the visor of the helm was bolted the face and jawbone of a human skull.

  “It’s actually pretty clever,” Kaleb said, “in a ‘limited intelligence’ sort of way.” He offered Laphert a friendly smile. “I’m curious: When you were drummed out of the Blacksmiths’ Guild, wouldn’t it have made more sense, given your talents, to become a jeweler or coppersmith? Weaving seems like a stretch.”

  It was hard to interpret an answer, given the fellow’s blubbering and sobbing, but he seemed to be telling them that, in a city as small as Kevrireun, those Guilds fell under the same general oversight as the blacksmiths’ did.

  The sorcerer nodded. “So when you learned of the report someone had made to the Guildmistress, about you embezzling from your former Guilds, you figured you could protect yourself and take over the local branch of the Guild in one stroke. And you had a perfect candidate to take the blame.”

  Not actually all that dissimilar, he mused inwardly, to some other scheme I could mention.

  “Let’s go,” Jassion muttered, irritable but subdued. “We’ve wasted our time.”

  “I believe,” Kaleb told him with a jaunty grin, “that it’s actually you who have wasted our time.”

  Jassion swept through the door, slamming it behind him.

  “Not,” Kaleb continued, his grin faltering as he turned toward his other companion, “that he was the only one.” Mellorin blushed and stared at her feet, her hair falling over her face in a flimsy curtain. She mouthed what might have been I’m sorry, though he couldn’t see well enough to be certain, and went after her fuming uncle—perhaps hoping to calm him down before he broke someone, perhaps fleeing from Kaleb’s disappointment.

  As soon as she was gone, all trace of humor or hurt—all trace of humanity—dropped from Kaleb’s features. Muttering a spell, he moved with supernatural speed, gathering pieces of the false armor and strapping them to the man who struggled and flopped against the wall. Only when the entire ensemble was complete did Kaleb step away. He cast a second enchantment, ensuring that none of the sounds—or screams—to follow would penetrate the house’s walls. And then a final spell, the price of irritating a vengeful sorcerer.

  Kaleb headed back toward the hostel in which they’d acquired rooms, leaving the armor—and the man trapped and silently shrieking within—to melt slowly into a puddle of slag.

  “WEST.”

  Kaleb rolled his eyes so hard he could practically see the voice inside his head. “Of course he’s going west,” he whispered as he leaned out the window of the austere little room. “You said he was in Emdimir. Unless he’s decided to liberate Rahariem on his own—or invade Cephira itself—there’s nowhere to go but west.”

  Nenavar’s sigh came clear through the psychic link. “Don’t be tiresome, Kaleb. It’s all our Cephiran friends have reported to me—and anyway, it’s a start. Get moving, and I’ll give you more when I have more.”

  Kaleb left the room, gathering his possessions with a single swoop of his arm. A second wave of his hand unlatched the door to the chamber beside his, and he slipped inside. For a moment he stood, watching the slumbering figure, scarcely visible in the light of a single candle.

  Mellorin moaned softly in her sleep and then, perhaps feeling his attention upon her, sat bolt upright on the lumpy mattress. She gasped, pulling the sheets to her chin—an amusing reaction, thought Kaleb, since her slip was more modest than some formal gowns.

  “I’m sorry I startled you,” he said softly.

  “Kaleb, what’s wrong? Is …” She glanced through the narrow gap in the shutters. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I know, but we have to get moving. I’ll explain when I’ve woken Jassion. You’d better get dressed.”

  “A-all right.”

  Nobody moved.

  “Um, Kaleb?”

  “Damn,” he said, weighting the word with as much exaggerated disappointment as he could manage. She smiled, despite herself, and Kaleb could not help but return it—for it seemed unlikely, now, that he would ever need suffer a repeat of her earlier defiance. He turned away, moving toward the third room as Mellorin began to change.

  JASSION HAD BEEN LESS sanguine about being awakened in the dark and silent hours of the morning, but Kaleb’s news mollified him quickly enough.

  “How?” the baron demanded as he darted around the room like an angry hummingbird, trying to dress himself for travel and gather up his belongings without so much as a second wasted in hesitation.

  “The spell on Davro,” Kaleb lied. “The tug’s gotten a lot stronger.”

  “I thought you said it couldn’t pinpoint him like that,” Mellorin said from the doorway.

  The sorcerer shrugged. “I also said I’d never attempted to backtrack a spell like this. Maybe it fluctuates. Maybe he’s trying to use it to find Davro, or someone else. Hell, maybe he’s picked up on my tampering and he’s laying a trap.”

  Jassion finally paused in his efforts. “And if so?”

  “Then we move carefully. It’s still taking us where we want to go.

  “Keep in mind,” he continued as Jassion resumed his efforts, “that I’m not claiming to know precisely where he is. I think I can get us close enough to where my other divinations—our others,” he corrected with a glance at Mellorin, “can pinpoint him.” Actually, Nenavar and the Cephirans can guide me close enough to where the blood-magic can pinpoint him. But you don’t need to know that just yet. “Still, we’re talking a lot of ground, and he’s not exactly staying put.” There was just enough emphasis on those last words to inspire the baron to redouble his efforts, and he stood
ready to leave but a few moments later.

  “We have to stop on the way out,” Kaleb told him, “and acquire blinders for the horses.”

  Two jaws dropped.

  “You just said we had to hurry!” Jassion protested.

  “And there aren’t any leather-goods shops open at this time of night,” Mellorin added.

  “Then we break in and steal them. Or leave sufficient coin to pay, if you’d prefer. But trust me, they’re necessary, and they’ll prove more than worth the time they take to acquire.”

  And again, as was becoming a habit that irritated Mellorin and drove Jassion up the wall more swiftly than Kaleb’s telekinesis, the sorcerer refused to explain any further.

  IT WAS AN HOUR, several miles, and three sets of blinders later that they finally got their answer. The road from Kevrireun wasn’t a true highway, but was sufficiently maintained that walking the horses in the dark had proved merely inconvenient, rather than dangerous. Owls and crickets called from afar, growing silent as the travelers approached, and the late night hours were just chilly enough to bring a shiver to the skin.

  Not long after the lingering lights of Kevrireun had vanished behind them, Kaleb spotted a small knoll up ahead. Handing his reins to Jassion without a backward glance, he jogged ahead to the top of the rise, whispering a spell to enhance his sight. It wasn’t much of a vantage point, but it’d do for a start.

  There he waited until his companions caught up. Jassion hurled the bridle back at him, and only Kaleb’s swift reflexes prevented them from lashing his face like a whip.

  “Do I look like a servant to you?”

  Mellorin snorted. “You should know better than to give Kaleb an opening like that.”

  The sorcerer ignored both of them as he handed around the blinders. “Put these on,” he instructed them. “On the horses,” he added to Jassion, as though the baron could possibly have misunderstood. “You’re shortsighted enough without them.”