The Warlord's Domain

by Peter Morwood

  "I was thinking; that's all."

  "Just another word for what I said." She lifted a towel and his black leather jerkin and shirt from where they were draped across the picket fence. "Ivern and her people; they still wonder about you. About us both."

  "Let them wonder," he said and returned the taidyo to its canvas sleeve among his other practice gear. With it he seemed to set aside his somber mood; or at least return it to whatever locked compartment of his mind he kept it in. "The less that people know, the less they can let slip."

  Aldric shrugged hurriedly into his clothes and then— with the merest shadow of a bow—took Widowmaker from her rack and slung the scabbard's strap across his shoulder, but instead of hooking it into a proper combat position on his weapon-belt he left the longsword loose against his hip. The hip farthest from Kyrin.

  There were stories about Isileth Widowmaker, and while he was not prepared to credit an inanimate piece of metal with such a thing as jealousy—not even a blade of her profound antiquity, no matter what the stories said—yet he was not about to take foolish chances. Aldric had seen too many strange things for that.

  Kyrin looked from his face to the black longsword, and then back. "Still brooding, as I said. About last night?"

  "And bad dreams? No. That was in the past."

  "So the past doesn't concern you. Aldric-an, you're a high-clan Alban. The past always concerns you. I swore an oath once—and as a high-clan Alban you above all should understand how closely a sincere oath can bind— to use my ability and my judgment for the benefit of the sick…"

  "Are you suggesting that I'm… sick?" Something unpleasant hovered in the way he asked it.

  "Not sick… not like that. But you're hurt; you're in pain. And I don't want you in pain, not ever. I want you rid of the old wounds, the ones that never healed. Time it was done with once and for all."

  "I don't need any help."

  "No? Not even when you tear at yourself, rip those ancient hurts wide open again every time they have a chance to close? I've watched you do it, Aldric, and it's an ugly thing to see. You're bleeding inside, man—and you're the only one who can't see it!"

  "I'm a killer, lady. A killer, not a healer. And all the good intentions in the world won't change that fact."

  "So then why blame yourself for Dewan?"

  Aldric looked up at her—a sharp, over-quick move-ment of head and eyes. "Because Dewan died when I was too slow to—"

  "No. He died because he'd seen the alternative. He gave himself for… for me. And for you. For both of us. Dewan died because he gave his life for ours. At least do him the courtesy of not debating his choice." She had never dared speak to him like this before—but it had to be said. That, and gentler things, like: "How much use would living be for me if you were gone?"

  Aldric said nothing for several minutes. There was real anger in his eyes, smoldering there like red coals, and for one frightening moment Kyrin thought that she had gone too far. Then the eyes closed briefly, squeezing tight, and when they opened again the moment was gone. "As little use," he said softly, "as my life would be without you."

  "So. You see."

  Aldric smiled at her, a wintry skinning back of lips from teeth. "Oh, yes, I see very well," he said, his voice clipped and quiet.

  "You were born and brought up kailinin-eir. Even if you choose to deny that heritage, the culture behind it is unchanged. Vengeance and blood-feud were—still are— accepted. Traditional. Just as killing yourself is an acceptable, traditional thing. Tsepanak'ulleth." She was pushing, bringing the unsaid into the open.

  "But why haven't you done it, Aldric? All the deaths, all the guilt, all the grieving. Why haven't you rid yourself of them? Why do you… not just live with them, but treat them as honored guests in the house of your mind? Because that's the way it looks to me. Why— when you've got your way out here?"

  She touched the black tsepan at his belt with one finger, a brief, careful contact as if with some dainty, deadly creature that was, for the moment only, tame and safe. "You haven't used it, Aldric. Tell me why not."

  Aldric let her hand withdraw to a safe distance, then gripped the lacquered hilt of the Honor-dirk and eased its three-edged spike of blade clear of its sheath. He stared in silence for the longest time at the weapon's bitter point. For so long; indeed, that Kyrin thought he might refuse outright to answer…

  Or worse, in one of those sudden spasms of fury, try to do what she had so scathingly suggested was permitted him to do. With the shadow of that fear rising in her mind, she reached out swiftly to lay a hand across his wrist. Not restraining it, not yet, but at least reminding him of her presence. He looked at her, full in the face, and again their eyes met; and now hers were worried and apprehensive while his had gone introspective, cold and emotionless as chips of ice.

  "Why not?" he echoed, speaking more to himself than to her. "Because I always thought my life was of more use than my death. While I was still alive I could set wrong things to rights. Justify myself to people. To you. To myself." The tsepan went back into its scabbard with a whisper of steel and a small, solid click.

  Greatly daring, Kyrin reached out and took it from him with an unvoiced sigh of relief. It was only when that dagger was out of his reach that she stared him in the eye and let a little of her fear escape as anger.

  "Justify yourself?" The question snapped out, harsher than it might have been, long patience at the end of its tether. "Then why don't you?"

  Aldric merely inclined his head in the beginnings of a bow. "Because whatever way I chose to do it, I truly had no reason until now."

  He pulled the square-faced gold ring from where he had always worn it on his right had and slipped its warm metal onto Kyrin's finger. "This will keep the place until I buy another just for you," he said.

  Kyrin looked at the ring on her finger and felt her eyes sting with the threat of tears. She stared at the tsepan in her hand as if she had never seen it before. The time was not long past when she wouldn't have dared to touch the Honor-dirk, much less make observations about the lightness of its use. That she had done so now, like the glimmer of gold on her hand where none had ever been before, meant something.

  Didn't it… ?

  Kyrin glanced back at Aldric, and a half-born word faltered on her lips as she realized he wasn't listening or even looking at her.

  Instead he was staring up toward the high hills to the east where the beams of the late-risen sun speared through a crack in the heavy sky. They were blurred and robbed of their full strength by the falling snow, but there was still enough power in the light to bleach sky and snow together to a blinding glare, like the mouth of a furnace but without any heat at all.

  "Company," said Aldric, his voice turned flat and unpleasant. Kyrin followed the direction of his gaze, squinting at the brilliance, and although her vision was shot with streaks and sparkles of phosphorescent purple she could see quite plainly what was wrong.

  The six riders on the hill-crest sat very still on their tall horses, long dark shadows streaked across the snow before them, no movement but the white breath of men and animals drifting on the breeze. They were half a mile away with the sun at their backs, but seen without seeing their faces Kyrin doubted that they were dinner guests. "Who are they?" Her words were not so much a question as a wondering aloud, but Aldric answered anyway.

  "Not friends," he said, his voice taking on the terrible calm that she recognized from the other times and other places. "If they've got a long-glass, they'll know we've seen them. Is anyone around the steading except us?"

  "No—Dryval's up at the farm and Ivern went off to market before I—"

  "Good. Into the stable: tack-room first. Saddle up in case we have to run for it. Then get some of my gear— both telekin and the great… no… the short-bow for you. A half-sheaf of arrows should be enough." He squinted at the distant horsemen again and shrugged. "No armor. Not visible, anyway. Willowleaf tips in case there's mail underneath."

  "I
'll ask you this again," said Kyrin, following him toward the stable door. "Who are they—or who do you think they might be?"

  Aldric took his eyes from the still-unmoving riders just long enough to give her a nasty sort of smile that showed far too many of his teeth. "An accurate list would take far too long," he told her, and there might have been just the merest touch of bitterness in his voice as he said it. "Let's just say that if they're looking for Ivern or the others I'll be grateful, and if they're looking for you I'll be surprised… And if they're looking for me without evil intentions I'll be downright astonished. Here they come!"

  The horsemen were moving, walking their mounts forward in a leisurely fashion, but after what Aldric had said—and what he had only hinted at—Kyrin would far rather have seen them riding away than coming any closer. Except that they were coming closer, and leisurely or not there was something in the way they sat their horses that made her uneasy. Even at such a distance she could see how they rode. She had seen Aldric fork a saddle that same way, menacing and businesslike, straight-legged, feet braced against long-leathered stirrups, spine braced against high, curved cantle, reins gathered together in one hand to leave the other free for weapons.

  The stable and tack-room were gloomy at the best of times, and seen through eyes which had been staring straight at the sun they were as black as a wolf's throat. They saddled both riding- and pack-horses more by touch and memory than by sight, and Aldric at least made a few false attempts at it if the sounds of clattering and an occasional oath meant anything. "You can use a bow, can't you?" he asked out of the darkness.

  "Yes, I can." If Kyrin's voice had an irritable edge to it, that was probably due more to nervousness than because she had to make an effort to keep her of course I can unspoken. The weapon was pushed into her hands a moment later, with an untidy bundle of wooden staves and feathers and leather straps that she guessed—rightly— were arrows and a bow, a shooting-glove and a bracer.

  "Telek," said Aldric, looming out of the shadows with a spring-gun in one hand. He broke it and spun its cylinder, then snapped it shut and worked the lever. The weapon's mechanisms clicked and the sear engaged with a small, solid noise. "There. It's loaded and cocked, so don't put a dart through your own foot; that trigger's got a light touch. Inside thirty feet, just point and squeeze."

  "I know. I know!" Kyrin took the spring-gun and felt its weight dragging at her hand, a crooked shape of wood and metal that was somehow far more sinister that a sword. She hefted the telek a few times and looked at Aldric's outline in the gloom. "But what happens if they aren't enemies… ?"

  "That's their misfortune, isn't it?" he said, his voice deadly calm. The voice of a man who had grown tired of being hunted all across the country by one faction or another. The voice of a man who had had enough.

  "So you'll shoot from cover, without warning. Like an assassin?"

  "Not like an assassin. Like a man outnumbered six— no, sorry"—she detected the glint of a tight smile in the way he corrected himself—"three to one. And I'll wait until I'm sure."

  Kyrin didn't reply, and Aldric could sense her disapproval without needing to see the stare and the compressed lips. He shrugged and laid a hand to the door. "But if you really want, there's one way to find out. I just hope they aren't good shots…"

  "That's not fair!"

  "All right, it's not. But we have to get out of here anyway, or risk them firing the place. I don't like the prospect of being trapped inside a burning building again…"

  Kyrin looked sharply at him, wondering about the story behind that "again." Before she could say anything the door kicked at Aldric's fingers as something smacked into it and an instant later dug into the floor, tearing a hole in the planks and letting a narrow shaft of daylight transfix the darkness of the tack-room.

  "Of course, there are other ways," he said blandly, "especially if they have crossbows. Convinced?"

  "Convinced. They don't have to come in at all, not if they've got enough ammunition?"

  "Tell me about it," said Aldric, and nipped a splinter from the pad of his thumb with his front teeth. "Which is another reason why I don't want to stay here."

  "But if they can already hit the door—"

  "Luck. Or accident. Probably…" That hesitation disturbed her more than any further words of explanation. "Or they've moved faster than I thought. Get down. Flat on the floor." He hooked the tip of his own greatbow under the door's hasp, muttered something under his breath and pulled, hard. Nothing happened. Again, and again nothing. A third time, much harder—

  —And the door jerked back, flooding the tack-room with light and a heavy swirl of the snow that was falling now in earnest. Five crossbow bolts flicked through the sudden opening and hammered into the back wall with a sound like a demented carpenter at work, almost too fast for the individual strikes to be counted. But not quite. "Go!" yelled Aldric.

  Even before Kyrin was clear of the floor, he had stepped into the doorway with an arrow already nocked to his bowstring, spotted a possible target, flexed, drawn and loosed all in one quick movement.

  The sound of the arrow's impact was mostly that of splitting timber, and five of the raiders burrowed for deeper cover. The sixth uttered a yell, shot his newly-loaded crossbow into the ground and swung out backward into the yard, nailed through the thigh to the door behind which he had crouched to reload and shoot. He was still yelling, outraged as much as hurt, and with good reasons for both sensations; nobody had thought to tell him that at such close range a wooden door was no obstacle at all even to ordinary arrows—and he was facing armor-piercing points.

  Aldric knew the drawbacks of a crossbow: they were murderously powerful, but because of that slow, cumbersome things. He had used them himself in better days, but only for hunting. Against a target able to shoot back, they were a liability during their lengthy reloading cycle without something solid to hide behind. Something much more solid than a door of thin-cut end-grained planks…

  And then the arrow pinning the raider's leg in place tore free and released him to fall sideways into the trampled show of the courtyard where, fighting forgotten, he used both hands to staunch the outflow of his blood. For all that his clothing was that of a peasant or a forester, unremarkable and instantly forgotten, the wounded man was wearing other garments underneath and had taken the trouble to conceal his features with a hooded mask.

  Both the mask and the close-fitting second suit of clothes were of some fine fabric gray as smoke.

  Aldric and Kyrin tumbled together into the relative shelter around the corner of the stone-built stable and crouched there, panting. "Oh, Lord God, we're in trouble," he said between gasps. "They're tulathin. Assassins."

  "Real assassins?"

  "Professionals."

  "We're in trouble." There was a pause, then: "But who hired them?"

  "Damned if I know." Aldric was already belly-down in the snow, squirming for a better position, with the seven-foot bow clamped crosswise between elbow-joint and biceps. "I'll ask that question later, if I'm alive to ask or they to answer"—he ducked as sparks and sharp-edged fragments sprayed from stone when another crossbow bolt probed at their shelter and went humming off at a crazy angle—"because I don't think taking me alive is part of their contract."

  A thread of crimson oozed down Kyrin's face from a gash left by a splinter, and she pressed a fistful of snow against it to staunch the bleeding. "Or anyone with you," she said, initial surprise becoming grim belief in all that he had told her these past weeks. All the fears, all the precautions, all the things which she had nodded at and agreed with, if only out loud but never in her heart.

  Matters were different now, facedown in the snow with her face stinging, weapons in her hands and the occasional intermittent buzz or metallic smack of passing bolts as a constant reminder that she was going to have to hurt or be hurt. Kill or be killed. Kyrin looked at the coldness in Aldric's face, a coldness which had nothing to do with the snow-melt soaking him, and shivered at
the sudden grim reality of it all.

  For just a moment she wanted to be sick, right then and there on the ground before her face; then the feeling passed into no more than a clammy shudder in her guts, and she braced her own bow across her arms as he had done and wriggled after him in the crushed snow of his wake.

  Ivern's steading might have been designed with defense in mind, and if it had been built in the past ten years there was no "might" about it. Except for the wooden doors, the stone buildings were sturdy enough to absorb a point-blank strike from anything that mounted raiders could have carried. The layout of house, annex, stables and outbuildings was such that there were no positions from which a missile weapon could dominate more than twenty feet in any directions; a range so short that leaden slingshot slugs or Army-issue weighted throwing darts would be of more use than the slow-to-reload crossbows—the kind of range at which Alban telekin excelled.

  "Our one advantage is," said Aldric quietly as he paused well short of a corner, "that a telek doesn't need reloading after every shot."

  "So what about the bows?" Kyrin touched her own shortbow with the tip of one finger. "Keep them or put them aside?"

  "Keep. We might get a clear shot somewhere. But this"—he indicated the ominous corner with a jerk of his head—"is likely to be telek work." He was breathing fast, and Kyrin could see the flutter of a rapid pulse in the hollow of his throat as he half-turned to lean his own bow and bundle of arrows against the wall.

  Aldric went round the corner in a half-roll and a flurry of snow, telek leveled at where a target might most likely be. There was no one there, but enough footprints marred an otherwise smooth snowdrift to suggest that someone had been, and recently.

  "Do you mean we have to kill them all?" whispered Kyrin in his ear. "Couldn't we drive them off?"

  "How?" The monosyllabic reply was bitter. Despite his well-feigned confidence he doubted that the pair of them could win unaided against five tulathin, let alone chivvy them away like a pack of annoying cur-dogs. Rather than kill all of the remaining assassins, it was more likely that the tulathin would kill them. Aldric looked sidelong at Kyrin, at the way her teeth nipped nervously at her lower lip, at the softness of her face, and privately decided that killing would be all that would be done to her—even if he had to make quite certain by doing it himself. He was angry at letting her get involved in this, putting her life at risk because of… whoever of the far-too-many in his past had sent this execution detail after him.