by Dale Lucas
Torval laid a rough hand on Rem’s shoulder. “Then hold on to that secretary set,” he said quietly, “and you can give it back to her when we find her.”
For just a moment, that thought gave Rem a deep and abiding satisfaction—a bright, warm hope in the center of him that he wanted—nay, needed—at that very moment. But only a moment later, another thought occurred to him, terrible and unsettling.
What if he held on to this small memento of that girl and never, ever saw her again?
A moment later he heard Ondego’s unmistakable rasp from one of the platforms above.
“Well?” the prefect demanded. “What have you lot got for me?”
“Slavers,” Torval shouted in reply. “And bodies.”
Those words froze Ondego and Hirk on the stairway. If the prefect had been silently celebrating their infiltration and raid on the Moon Under Water before that moment, all the bravado and exaltation left him. It was subtle—a squaring of the shoulders, a lift of the chin, the impression of a frown—but even at his present distance from the prefect, Rem noted the change.
“Did we nab any?” Ondego asked, then once more began his descent of the stairs.
“Not a one,” Djubal said bitterly. “They’d all fled before we reached the cavern.”
“Well, then,” Ondego grumbled, “it’s a good thing I’ve already dispersed the watchwardens upstairs to inform the city guard at the gates and wharves. Ten to one, our slavers will try to slip away quick and quiet-like with the warm bodies they already have. Let me see what you’ve found here.”
They walked him through. They showed him the barrels, the stolen merchandise, sorted for resale, the two dead prisoners in their casks. Finally, Ondego knelt and studied the half-conscious girl that Djubal and Klutch attended to. Rem was amazed to see true pity and sadness on the prefect’s normally inscrutable face.
“Who’s responsible for this?” Rem finally asked, not sure if he was addressing anyone. He bent to Ondego. “Did you get any of the men above to talk—”
“We caught two,” Ondego said grimly. “But they haven’t talked yet.”
“Then let us make them talk,” Torval growled.
Ondego studied Torval for a moment. He then looked to Rem. There was a strange sort of concern on his face. “Think you can handle it, Bonny Prince? Some up close and personal interrogation?”
Rem spat onto the salt-washed rocks of the cave floor. “Gladly, sir.”
Ondego nodded. “Then get back upstairs and get to work. Frennis could be here at any moment, and he’ll probably chase us out. I’ve already got an inkling that bastard is tied up in this somehow. If we can get one of those men upstairs to talk—”
Ondego didn’t have to finish. Hirk cocked his head—an indication to follow. Rem and Torval set out after him, hurrying back through the passages and up the stairs.
Hirk led them to one of the upstairs rooms, where two men of the Fifth—fat Demijon and the Tregga horseman Brogila—stood guarding one of the two prisoners. The fellow sat on a wooden chair, leaning casually, as though he were waiting for some friend to finish his tryst so the two could be on their way. He was a hard-looking fellow, probably past forty years but still well-muscled and fearless in aspect. When Hirk, Torval, and Rem entered the room, the prisoner smiled a toothless smile and barked harsh, grating laughter.
“Look here, now!” he said. “A pretty-faced lad and his half-pint fool! You are a motley band, aren’t ya?”
Rem almost lunged for the prisoner, but Torval beat him to it. The dwarf swept right past Hirk, and hove up to the hard-faced prisoner without a moment’s hesitation.
“Gonna dance for me, li’l fella?” the prisoner asked.
Torval brought one of his thick, oversized feet down on the prisoner’s left foot. Just before the fellow started screaming, Rem swore he heard bones crack. The prisoner drew his foot up off the floor and reached out for it with his hands. The sound he made was childish and hysterical and not at all what Rem would have expected from such an apparent roughneck.
Then Torval struck again. Before the fellow could even grasp his raised foot in pain, Torval drew back with one fist and punched him three times, hard, square in the face. The prisoner’s screams were swallowed in the rattle of breaking teeth and the gurgle of blood and saliva as he choked and snuffled. Down he went, toppling heavily out of his chair and onto the floor, where he curled up in a fetal ball, broken foot twitching, hands covering his now-ruined face and bleeding nose.
“You bastard!” he snuffled. “You bloody little stump!”
Torval stood over the prisoner. He was only four and a half feet tall, but from where that fellow lay, the dwarf probably looked like a giant. The fury on his face even put a knot in Rem’s belly. There was a great reserve of righteous indignation in Torval for those who were preyed upon. That reserve was now alight and burning in the center of him, red hot and approaching white.
“Do you have any idea what you’re mixed up in here?” Torval asked his prisoner. “Kidnapping free citizens of this city and shipping them out—in gods-damned barrels—for slave labor on some foul foreign shore? A public disemboweling and flaying is probably in your future, my friend.”
“What difference does it make?” the prisoner grated, still sobbing over the broken bones in his foot.
“Talk,” Torval said. “Tell us everything.”
The prisoner tried to prop himself up on one hand to better face Torval and defy him. The moment his hand touched the plank floor, Torval brought his maul’s hammerhead crashing down. Rem heard the suspect’s fingers crack like pine logs on a fire. The prisoner drew up his ruined hand and fell back hard, head thumping into the floor.
Torval loomed over him again. “Talk, or I’ll be here all night breaking bones, one after the other.”
The prisoner was not just screaming now, or snuffling and choking on his blood and snot. He was crying, sobbing like a switch-scolded child.
“Please,” he muttered. “Someone get him away from me …”
“Sorry, friend,” Hirk said. “Torval here’s the officer in charge at the moment.”
Torval kicked the prisoner’s ribs, hard. He doubled up where he lay on the floor.
“I can’t hear you,” Torval snarled.
“All right, gods, just stop!” the man bawled. “What do you want to know?”
Torval lowered his maul, brandishing the hammer and spike in the suspect’s face. “Keep talking,” he said. “Where are they bound for?”
“Aadendrath,” the bawling, bleeding villain said. “They sail before dawn, from North Harbor! That’s what we were told, at least … now, please …”
“Shut your gob!” Torval barked, then looked to Rem. His face was caught somewhere between anger and terror. “Aadendrath,” he whispered.
“The elf isle?” Rem asked, thoroughly confused.
“Yarma’s cunt,” Hirk sighed. “That is a bloody mess, and no mistake.”
Torval turned back to the sobbing prisoner. “That doesn’t make any bloody sense. Elves don’t keep slaves—everyone knows that.”
Rem had an unbidden memory of that handsome, muscular man on a leash in the Lady Ynevena’s pleasure garden.
Elves didn’t own slaves … everyone knew that. Just as everyone knew that dwarves never left their caves or undertook pursuits forbidden by their lawgivers. Just as everyone knew orcs were nothing more than pitiless, mindless, war-mongering beasts, or that children of power and privilege never ran away from that privilege in some blind, idiotic quest for independence or total reinvention. What was it that Torval himself had said to the elven ethnarch? There are wormy apples on every tree in the orchard. Maybe it was true that elves, by and large, weren’t the sorts to keep slaves. But there were those rare rotten apples, weren’t there?
Aemon’s bones, hadn’t they even met that rarest of rare birds, an elven merchant who lived and worked among men in a sprawling city with nary a forest or placid lake in sight? Where else but in Ye
nara—
And then, almost at once, Rem thought he understood. When Torval asked his next question, Rem suspected he knew the answer.
“Who runs this place?” Torval demanded.
The prisoner shook his head. “He’ll have my soul. I can’t—”
Torval bent down and snatched the man up by his tunic. “I’ll have your head!” Torval growled, “But not before I’ve taken you apart from the feet up! Who is he? Who’s the rotten son of a whore in charge around here?”
“It’s Masarda, isn’t it?” Rem asked. “Mykaas Masarda.”
Torval turned and stared at him, mouth agape.
So did the prisoner, as though Rem’s speaking aloud that name would doom them all.
“You know the fauneys practice black magic,” he whispered, his hysteria suddenly bound by pure terror. “When he finds out that I betrayed him …”
Rem turned to Torval, eyes wide. “Did you hear that? Almost exactly what Joss said to Frennis before he fed him to the sharks! ‘He’ll kill you for this, Frennis. He’ll not just have your skin, he’ll have your soul.’”
Torval stared at the prisoner, nodding. “Because everyone assumes those bloody tree huggers wield magic of some sort or another …”
“Who is this Masarda?” Hirk demanded.
Rem threw a glance at Hirk. “You know him,” Rem said. “We all know him.”
Torval dropped the man. He studied Rem. “He was the one who came to us with news of Telura Dall’s disappearance,” Torval said, “offering that reward. How did you come to that conclusion, Bonny Prince?”
Rem nodded to the man on the floor. “What he said about their ultimate destination is a good start. Could anyone but an elf peddle kidnapped slaves to other elves? And then there’s the presence of his bodyguard, downstairs. The same man that I just crossed swords with in the common room stood by Masarda’s side at the Dall wake, and tried to kill us while we slept earlier today. I saw the wound on his arm plainly.”
Torval’s eyes widened. “Did you now …?”
“Think of your own words to me, Torval: there are all sorts under the sun—and wormy apples on every tree. If his thorning scar is a sign that he was once a slave, wouldn’t enslaving the sons and daughters of the very people that stole his life and identity from him make for a fine revenge?”
Torval seemed to quietly consider all that for a moment. “Aye,” he finally whispered. “That would be a fine vengeance, indeed.”
“Care to place coin on the fact that he was Lugdum’s unnamed master? That that poor creature was only following us—and finally threatened us—because Masarda commanded him to?”
Torval nodded. “Makes sense …”
Hirk shook his head. “The sundry hells it does—”
Rem ignored their sergeant and knelt beside the prisoner. “Which wharf?” he asked.
The knave only bawled and bled. A rope of pink, bloody snot hung from one nostril. His probing tongue found a tooth rolling loosely around in his mouth and he spit it out.
“Which wharf?” Rem demanded.
The fellow had no words left.
And that’s when the door to their erstwhile interrogation room burst open. Standing outside was a familiar copper-haired fellow standing beside a scowling Ondego. Frennis had arrived. Rem said a tiny prayer that there were no sharks at hand for this suspect to be fed to.
“What the bloody hell is all this?” the prefect of the Fourth demanded.
Hirk looked to Ondego. Ondego shrugged.
“Interrogation,” Hirk said. “Sir.”
“Give us five more minutes, Frennis,” Ondego asked. “I’d give you the same, and you know it.”
Frennis’s glaring eyes locked on Rem and Torval. “These two again? Twice in one night?”
Torval scowled back at Frennis, never mind that the prefect of the Fourth was twice his height and twice his mass. “Perhaps if you’d helped us the first time …”
“Shut it,” Ondego said, but there was no urgency in the order, just a weary hope that Torval would not make things worse.
Frennis’s glare became a foul, cruel smile. He turned to Ondego. “I’ll be going to Black Mal with this, Ondego—you can count on it. If you’re lucky, he’ll only strip you of your badge and your command.”
That challenge didn’t sit well with Ondego. At first, Rem had clearly read the weary resignation on the prefect’s face—clearly saw that Ondego was not interested in challenging Frennis, but simply in controlling the amount of damage done by their interference with ward protocol. But that threat from Frennis had a different effect—an unexpected effect—than what Rem wagered Frennis intended.
On the floor, the suspect continued to cry and whimper. He displayed his hand for the two prefects and asked for the aid of a surgeon. Torval kicked him in the gut and stole his breath.
Rem, meanwhile, watched his commander closely. Ondego, though a good handbreadth shorter than Frennis, hove up nose to nose with his rival prefect and glared right back at him.
“Last time I checked, we had taken the same oaths and were fighting the same nightly war,” Ondego said through gnashed teeth. “I beg your sincere pardon for the suspension of protocol, but now that we know what we’re dealing with—”
“And just what is that?” Frennis pressed. “Do tell, Ondego.”
Ondego almost answered in full, then Rem saw the change come over him. The decision to challenge the burly prefect; the decision to interrogate him, right here in front of everyone.
“I think you know all too well,” Ondego said quietly. “And I swear to you, I will prove it.”
Rem studied Frennis carefully. The prefect’s face remained stony, cross, inscrutable, but Rem thought he saw the barest hint of something hitherto unseen. A frightened narrowing of the eyes. A twitch at the corner of Frennis’s wide mouth.
Finally, the big man turned and surveyed the interrogation room again. He spoke calmly, quietly. “Looks like you’ve overstayed your welcome. I want you and your men out of here, now.”
“Frennis, don’t you dare—”
“Take it up with Black Mal and come back to me with a mandate,” Frennis hissed. “Until then, get out of my ward and leave all your prisoners with my men.”
Ondego snapped his fingers. “Out. All of you. Leave him.”
Rem rose and followed his fellows out of the room. As he left, he heard the suspect mewling and trying to weakly hawk a ball of phlegm out of his throat.
As they approached the stairs, Torval hurried up abreast of Ondego.
“Mykaas Masarda,” he said flatly. “Sailing off with the dawn.”
“Then we’ll find him,” Ondego said quietly, “and we’ll burn his ship down around him.”
CHAPTER TWENTY–SEVEN
Rem was relieved to find that Aarna was alive and well, waiting in the common room under the watchful eye of some of their fellow Fifth Warders, but he was equally a little ashamed to realize that, after running off to Torval’s aid, he had completely forgotten that she was present or that she might need protecting. Before Rem could inquire after her of his own accord, however, Torval rushed to her and lifted her up in a crushing bear hug, eliciting a scream of surprise from her. Thankfully, she seemed unscathed and grateful for the excitement.
Soon enough, Ondego and Hirk were leading their men out of the Moon Under Water, moving the lot of them southeastward, toward the border of the Fourth and Second Wards, their pace quick and deliberate.
As they marched, Ondego and his executive officer made plans, plans that Rem overheard because he and Torval stayed close on their commander’s heels the whole way. Ondego would take half the Fifth Warders present with him, to double-time it across the city and approach North Harbor from the landward side. Meanwhile, Hirk and the rest would hurry down to the Third Ward wharves and cross the harbor in launches. Ondego wagered that by the time his men were in place on the landward side, Hirk and his men could have Masarda’s ship in their sights. The squads in their launches th
en need only wait for the landward forces to storm the berthed ship.
It was there, on the borders of two wards, as the men of the Fifth separated and sped to their separate duties, that Aarna quickly offered both Torval and Rem kisses of gratitude and farewell, then separated from them and headed back toward the King’s Ass. Rem left Indilen’s secretary set in Aarna’s keeping, voicing the not-too-convincing hope that, if they yet found her alive, he wanted it returned to her. Aarna offered a smile full of silent assurance: they would find her, that smile said. All would end well. Rem wasn’t sure he believed that, but he appreciated Aarna’s uncanny and sincere ability to make him think he believed it, if only for a fleeting moment.
If he was not mistaken, he thought he saw Torval looking like a love-struck pup as they watched Aarna begin her stroll back to her tavern and home.
But the lovesickness afflicting both of them, man and dwarf, would have to wait. Presently, they had more pressing concerns, and Rem had every intention of being involved in the reckoning to come, one way or another. Having seen what Masarda and his conspirators had done to those they had taken prisoner in the Moon Under Water, he could not countenance the thought of not being instrumental in the pointy-eared bastard’s swift seizure and punishment. Truth be told, if there was a killing blow to be struck, he half-hoped he might be the one to strike it.
And what of Indilen? Would she still be among the prisoners awaiting transfer, or had her ship already sailed? If she was already gone, what were their real chances of ever finding and recovering her again?
Comport yourself as if you will find her, Rem told himself, as if you must find her. Let nothing shake your resolve.
“Hurry now,” Torval said, and Rem suddenly realized that he was standing idle, lost in his thoughts, while the rest of their company jogged down toward the wharf. Rem fell in step behind them.
Thus, Hirk led Torval, Rem, and the remaining men at his disposal down to the docks of the southern harbor, where they piled into four commandeered launches and began a swift, silent glide across the waters toward the quayside wharf where Masarda’s ship with its odious cargo prepared to sail.