The Three Lands Omnibus (2011 Edition)

by Dusk Peterson

  The cluster of townsfolk was beginning to thin away. Nearby, a stall-keeper removed his remaining goods from the display crates. Another stall-keeper pulled down the flap at the front of his tent. The rest of the townsfolk wandered toward the door leading out of the market.

  It was Carle who finally broke the silence. "Blood for blood – yes, we know how these matters go. And the King demanded the blood of Cold Run's baron's brother, someone told me recently. Is Blackwood demanding the blood of Mountside's baron's son?"

  The soldier shrugged as he wiped his greasy dagger on his tunic. "I doubt anyone except the original villagers cares about the fate of that hunter any more. There've been too many deaths on both sides since that time."

  "And the original villagers?" My voice sounded hollow but calm. "Has Mountside's baron said anything more about his son?"

  The soldier shrugged again. The events in that village, understandably, seemed to be of no further interest to him. Carle, smelling the scent on this track begin to fade, switched to a new path. "And amidst this all, the Jackal appears. I have been wondering about that, you know. Why the Jackal should have made his first appearance so close to the villages where the feud began. Do you think it is a coincidence?"

  I stared at Carle, at awe once more at his mind's quickness. In the short interval after the time that the soldier told his startling tale, I could not have possibly made the connection between that and Malise's announcement, many months ago, that the Jackal's first appearance in the borderland had been in a village near Mountside.

  The soldier smiled. "A jackal always scents the blood of the dead, I suppose? Your guess is as likely to be true as mine. Though my roommate might know."

  "Your roommate?" Carle peered down at his flask, now empty of all water.

  "Yes, I room with a soldier who's from Borderknoll, originally. He wasn't there when the Jackal appeared, but of course he has family in the village. He might know whether the Jackal said anything about these other villages."

  "Really?" Carle's tone was idle as he continued to stare at his flask. "Is your roommate home now?"

  "Him?" The soldier roared with laughter. "Not him. He's as much a night-carouser as those decadent Emorians."

  "Indeed?" Carle flashed him a smile. "Out all night, sampling the fleshpots, is he?"

  "That's him. A girl in each arm, and a cup of wine in each hand. He'll stumble home sated and drunk some time in the night. How he manages to wake himself each morning . . ." The soldier shook his head as he rose to his feet. "Me, I'm for an early night. But if you want to meet him, I could bring him by here tomorrow. . . ." He was eyeing Carle's flask, obviously hoping for an offer of more than water the next day.

  "That is very kind of you," said Carle, not moving his eye from the flask. "But I have come to Blackpass on business, and I fear I will be leaving for home tomorrow. Adrian, would you refill this?"

  I took the water flask from him without a word. The soldier, disappointed from hopes of free wine, began to rise, but was forestalled as Carle said, "There is one other thing I have always wondered, and only a soldier such as you can tell me. . . ."

  I did not hear the rest of the conversation. I had gone back to the cheese-seller's stall and was beckoning to the merchant there while keeping one eye on Carle and the soldier.

  o—o—o

  By the time I returned to the market, it was closed for the night. Carle was waiting for me, standing in the shadow of a tree. He was as dark as a breacher on a moonless night.

  I joined him in his hideaway. "Well?" he said in a low voice.

  "He boards just down the road. I looked through the window while he was readying himself for bed. He lives in a single room with two cots; the second cot was empty."

  "That was good hunting." Carle squeezed my shoulder briefly, and I felt the warmth of his approval enter me. He gestured – the old, familiar gesture of a sublieutenant ordering his partner to take the lead – and I began walking with him down the street. The street was nearly empty now, since, as the soldier had put it in his rude manner, most Koretians retire to bed at an earlier hour than Emorians.

  "No hope of tracking this roommate down at one of the aforementioned fleshpots, I suppose?" Carle enquired quietly.

  "None," I said. "Officially, no brothels exist in Koretia; prostitution is against the gods' law. The unofficial brothels take time to track down . . . or so I've heard."

  "Never been to one yourself?" Carle enquired.

  "Never." I glanced his way. "And you?"

  "No, I received many a lecture from my father on the necessity of reserving one's seed for one's properly wedded wife." Carle pushed aside the bough of a tree that was growing in the middle of the street.

  "But your father . . ." I said awkwardly.

  "Was an adulterer. I learned more lessons from his ill behavior than from any lecture he gave me. I've no intention of treating any woman in such a filthy manner. I'll wait until I can bed a wife, though I don't plan to marry till I'm retired from army service." He glanced my way.

  I was grateful to him for his chatter on light matters; it had given me the time I needed to recover from what the soldier had told us. I said, "I'm sorry."

  "Is your confession to me or to the Chara?" As usual, Carle didn't pretend to misunderstand what I meant. "Adrian, you can't take the burdens of the world into your arms. You refused to murder, and other men used that as an excuse to murder further. It's their folly that has created this war, not anything you did."

  I swallowed. "If I had allowed Griffith to sight and kill me, the feud would have ended."

  "And Griffith would have become a murderer, which would have done his spirit no good." Carle squeezed my shoulder again as we passed under the hearth-light spilling out from someone's upstairs dwelling. "Griffith is Cold Run's baron – am I right in remembering that? Truth to tell, he's the only one besides yourself and Fenton and your intended victim that I respect in this story. At least Griffith made an attempt to end the feud peacefully."

  I nodded as I stared down at the dirt of the street. "He has always been honorable; that's why my cousin Emlyn chose him as his blood brother. But now that the feud has spread beyond the original villages . . ."

  "This land," Carle said carefully, "has been dry tinder, waiting for a spark that would create a conflagration. The spark could have been anything. You're not to blame yourself for this, Adrian."

  His voice had turned stern. I forced myself to move my attention back to my duties. The streets had turned very quiet; nobody would be about now except soldiers . . . and the criminals whom the soldiers sought to apprehend. Seeing a flicker of movement down the street, I took hold of Carle's sleeve, and he and I melted into the recess of a doorway.

  "There," I whispered, pointing. "That house on the corner. You can see the door from here?"

  Carle shaded his eyes against the moonlight. "Is that the only door?"

  "Yes. If the roommate comes home tonight, he'll have to enter there. Do you think he's likely to have any useful information?"

  Carle shrugged. "Who's to say? But we already know much more than we knew at the beginning of the night. And if we could send information to the Chara about any connection that the Jackal might have to this feud . . ."

  I knew what he was thinking. Not only would we be providing service to the Chara, but I would be able to make partial recompense to the Chara for the trouble that I had started at his border. Silently, I handed Carle the flask.

  He took a swig from it and nearly choked in surprise. "Adrian, this is wall-vine wine. Where did you get it?"

  "From the cheese-merchant," I replied. "I told him that you needed a bit of wine to see you through your sentry-duty tonight because you were born in the south, and like all southern Koretians, you were very frail, unable to cope with the chill night air of the north—" I jerked away, laughing, as Carle made a mock punch at me.

  "'Very frail.'" He grinned as he handed me back the flask. "Next time we do sword-practice, I'll show
you how 'very frail' I am. Don't you think it's dangerous to make a remark like that to me in Koretia? Aren't you afraid I'll duel you?"

  "No." I smiled at him as I sipped from the flask.

  "No," Carle agreed, and taking the flask from me, he settled back in the recess of the doorway, his eye on the house where we awaited the hunted. I took my journal out of my back-sling and began to write.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The twenty-ninth day of August in the 941st year a.g.l.

  We finally gave up our watch when the moon set, about three hours before dawn.

  "If we don't get back now, the lieutenant will notice that we're gone, and then he'll have us up for a reprimand for being absent without his leave," said Carle with a lazy grin. "I haven't even figured out yet how we're going to break the news to him about how we spent our night."

  That turned out to be the least of our worries. We were delayed reaching the border because we kept meeting clusters of soldiers on the streets, and we had to find ways to bypass them because we didn't want to draw attention to ourselves at such a late hour. Then we had to figure out a way to get past the locked town gates. Then we had to stumble our way down a moonless forest path. By the time we finally made it to the border, it was an hour before dawn. As we peered cautiously around the rock shielding us from view, the first man we sighted was Quentin, talking to the Koretian subcaptain.

  Carle swore a few phrases I had best not record, then followed it up with the more conventional curse: "May the high doom fall upon us. We'll never get past Quentin, and he must know that we're gone anyway."

  "What do we do?" I asked. "Wait until he returns to the hut?"

  "No, he's probably worried since we've been gone all night. He may even have told the Koretians of our prank. We had better brazen this out."

  I could hear Quentin's voice from where we crouched. The words were unclear, but his voice was raised above its normal level. The voice stopped with the abruptness of a horse rearing to a halt as we emerged from behind the rock. The other border guards, who had been talking amidst themselves, fell silent as well as we walked forward. Finally we reached the ridge marking the border between Koretia and the no-man's-land of the mountains. Carle said, with forced jocularity, "Good day to you, lieutenant! We have come to surrender to you for our crime of being pranksters."

  His joke plopped like a dull stone into the pool of silence around us. Quentin gazed upon us expressionlessly. After a moment, though, a grin appeared on the face of the subcaptain, who said in an easy voice, "There you are, lieutenant. I told you they would return home in the end."

  "So you did." Quentin's voice was even softer than usual. "Will you allow my men over the border, sir?"

  "Certainly." The subcaptain looked over at his own men, whose smiles now matched his own. "We have no reason for wanting to keep patrol guards in our land, do we?" He stepped back and waved the two of us through.

  "Thank you, sir." Quentin's voice was still very soft. "As you can imagine, I will have much to say to you shortly, but for now, will you allow me a few minutes to talk with my men?"

  "Take as much time as you wish, lieutenant." The subcaptain leaned idly against the mountain wall. "I'm sure that you have plenty to say to them."

  Quentin made no reply, but turned and started walking toward the hut. Carle and I exchanged glances before following him. Already I was rehearsing in my mind a more elaborate excuse than the one Carle and I had originally composed. Seemingly, the same thought was in Carle's mind, for as Quentin closed the hut door behind us, Carle said rapidly, "Lieutenant, we would have been back sooner, but we happened across some important information that we thought the Chara might—"

  "Stand at alert!"

  I've been a patrol guard for a year now; not since my first meeting with him had I heard Quentin shout. I saw Carle's mouth sag open, and then, like me, he was scrambling to place himself rigid against the hut wall.

  For a moment, Quentin did nothing more than pace rapidly up and down in front of us, like a mountain cat guarding her territory. Then he stopped, scanned us with his cold blue eyes, and said softly, "I have been in the patrol for nearly ten years, and during that time I have served with dozens of other patrol guards. With the exception of one man who had his name struck from the records of the patrol, I have never met a patrol guard with whom I would say that I was ashamed to serve. But now I may have met two."

  In the silence that followed, there was a knock on the door, and Levander's head poked in. Quentin glanced his way and said, "Ride back as swiftly as you can to the headquarters. If you arrive in time, tell Captain Wystan that the guards have been found. Tell him that the guards are unharmed and that they crossed the border of their own volition. Ask Captain Wystan what I should say to the Koretians; tell him I urgently require an answer."

  "And if I am not in time, sir?" Levander's voice was taut.

  "You will know if you are not in time; you will see them coming toward you, faster than storm clouds from the north. In that case, you will have to try to give your message directly to the Chara. Do your best to gain access to his ear, soldier."

  Levander swallowed hard, but nodded. He closed the door, so that the room remained lit only with the slivers of pre-dawn light passing through the shutters. After another long pause, during which the hoofbeats of Levander's horse disappeared into the distance, Quentin began pacing again. He said, "It might interest you to know what has been happening during your . . . prank. After the subcaptain decided that I should invite the two of you to join him and me for dinner at the local inn, I returned to the hut and discovered your absence. I immediately knew that both of you were in grave trouble. I knew this partly because I found your uniforms in the chest here, and I knew that you would not take off your uniforms while on duty. The other reason I knew that you were in danger was that I was sure that no man who served under me would ever break the Mountain Patrol Law and leave the mountains before the snows came, except under orders."

  I scarcely dared breath, so frightened was I of attracting Quentin's attention. He stopped in front of Carle, stared levelly into his eyes and said, "Or did you forget that law, sublieutenant?"

  "No, sir." Carle's voice was clipped so short I could barely make out what he was saying.

  "Are you familiar with that law, soldier?" Quentin asked me.

  This was sarcasm, as every patrol guard memorizes the Law of the Border Mountain Patrol before giving his oath. I ventured to say, "I thought it meant that we couldn't go into Emor."

  "Is that what the law says?"

  "No, sir," I replied in a subdued voice.

  Quentin's pacing began again. His footsteps were the only sounds we could hear, aside from laughter from the Koretian guards. Presently, Quentin said, "I could only think of two circumstances that might have happened: either the Koretians had kidnapped both of you in order to question you about the secrets of the patrol, or someone had recognized you, Soldier Adrian, and had taken you by force into Koretia, and the sublieutenant was tracking your kidnapper. In either case, you were both in immediate danger, so I had Soldier Levander nearly kill his horse in delivering a message to Captain Wystan, telling him what had happened. This was not, of course, the first time that a patrol guard had been kidnapped. With your knowledge of the law, sublieutenant, I am sure that you can tell me what happened last time."

  He paused again before Carle. I could see bright against Quentin's uniform his gold honor brooch, which the subcommander gave him last winter in reward for his attempted sacrifice for the patrol.

  Carle said in a stiff voice, "Yes, sir. Five days passed before the patrol was able to locate the missing guard, and by that time he had been tortured to death by the Koretians, who wished to discover the secrets of the patrol."

  "And what did the Chara promise as a result?" coaxed Quentin softly.

  I heard the sound of Carle swallowing before he replied, "To declare war on the Koretians if a patrol guard ever went missing again."

  "T
o declare war . . ." said Quentin slowly. "Well, I am sure that you both will be glad to know that the Chara does not forget his promises. When Captain Wystan informed him yesterday evening of your disappearance, the Chara ordered the army put on high alert. I was to send word at dawn as to whether the missing guards had been found. If you were still absent at that time, the Empire of Emor would go to war against the Land of Koretia."

  There was a muffled sound that I identified as Carle trying to hold back a choke. It was a cool morning, from my perspective, but I could feel the sweat biting at the back of my neck.

  "The Koretians, in addition to immediately placing their borderland divisions on high alert, were courteous enough to send out search units to try to locate you," said Quentin. "Some time this morning, I will have to appear before the Baron of Blackpass to convey, not only my own apology, but that of the Chara for what has happened. And all this occurs at a time when relations between Koretia and Emor are particularly delicate, due to the war here."