Not Quite Scaramouche

by Joel Rosenberg

  The only trouble with that sense was that it was unreliable.

  "For what it's worth ..." Pirojil shrugged.

  "Me, neither."

  Either Erenor hadn't been doing his job or the baron had overruled him: instead of staying in place like they should have, Jason Cullinane rode up, Toryn lagging only a little behind on the huge white mare that made the slim man look almost doll-like, while the dwarf brought up the rear on his sad-looking brown gelding, leading the three pack horses. Ahira always seemed to pick a small, sad-looking horse, one that could, seemingly, barely bear up under the considerable weight of an armed, armored dwarf, but he was always considerate enough to mount his heavy gear on one of the pack animals.

  "Some problem?" he asked.

  Well, if they were under observation, it would probably be best to keep moving. They could make better time on the road than almost anything could make through the woods, even an ore.

  "I'm not sure," Pirojil said, swinging his leg back over the saddle. "I think Kethol needs to walk his horse for awhile; I'll take point and we can let him catch up later."

  The baron nodded. "I could – "

  "No." The dwarf was already out of the saddle. For someone so strong, he always seemed to have a hard time mounting up, but wasted neither time nor motion in dismounting. "Kethol is best in the woods; Pirojil and I can back him up if need be." The dwarf's smile said that he was looking forward to that sort of event, which made him either a liar or a fool. Or both, perhaps; a fool could lie as well.

  "I'm not totally useless in such situations," Toryn said.

  Ahira grunted. "Are you volunteering?" He raised a hand to forestall an answer. "Never mind – if three isn't enough, four won't be. You stay with Erenor and the baron, and send up a signal rocket if it all breaks loose."

  Kethol approved. Toryn was a good hand with a sword, but he was no woodsman, and Kethol didn't trust him the way he did Pirojil, or even Erenor – for a wizard; Erenor was awfully good at moving stealthily. Probably came from having to sneak out of town all the time.

  And Ahira? If the dwarf thought he could be useful, Kethol would trust him.

  Crashing through the woods was a good way to get yourself killed, if there was anybody around who had the ability and desire. Moving silently through the woods was impossible off a beaten path, and difficult on one. So, his longbow strung, an arrow nocked – he could drop it to one side and draw his knife, if need be – Kethol walked down the road, Ahira and Pirojil trailing well behind him, until he found a game path, separated from the woods by just a fringe of windbreak. Deer might well like to take a nibble – or more than several nibbles – from a cornfield, but they would avoid the open throughout the day, and perhaps the night as well. The strip of forest alongside the road was, legally speaking, a baronial hunting and foresting preserve, where only squirrel, rabbit, and fox – nuisance animals – could be taken, and where cedar, oak, maple, and willow were also protected from harvest without a warrant.

  But the emperor, back when he was a baron, before Jason Cullinane had abdicated the throne in his favor, had indefinitely extended the wartime blanket permission to hunt deer on farmland, and the deer had become increasingly wary. Which, of course, made them more insistent on sticking to cover, staying out of the open, and, ironically enough, made the hunt even easier for somebody patient enough to find a stand along a game trail, and wait.

  And which, at the same time, made travel along the same game paths more likely for everybody.

  Kethol shivered for a moment as he left the sun-warmed road for the forest.

  Whether it was ancient road builders or equally ancient wizards that had prevented the Prince's Road from being overgrown, neither had worked their craft beyond the roadbed itself; leafy giants twisted their limbs overhead, swallowing Kethol up into green coolness before he went half a hundred paces in.

  Dozens of years and thousands of hooves and feet had beaten the dirt of the path solid, only pierced here and there by a projecting tree root. Little light trickled through, but there was enough for Kethol to see where an occasional misplaced hoof had planted itself off the path and in the rotting humus that covered the forest floor.

  He followed the trail inward, past where little balls of droppings told of an owl's nest, high above, hidden from view, past where two small, beady eyes peeked out of a shadow beneath an upthrust root, disappearing into that shadow before Kethol could decide whether it was a ground squirrel or a gopher, past where flattened grasses told of a place where a deer had rested, and recently ... until the trail suddenly broke on a clearing ahead: a meadow.

  Kethol signaled for a halt, and knelt down, listening.

  No, it was still too quiet. No farther. There was something out there, certainly; something watching them, clearly; something waiting for them, perhaps.

  But dashing out from the cover of the forest and into an open clearing, exposing himself – and worse: the others, following him – to attack by whatever it was ...

  Yes, he would do it under orders. There was a lot you did when you were ordered to do it, and more that you would do if you had to. He would probably do it if there was something, someone across the clearing who needed rescuing. Kethol had been roundly cursed by both Dunne and Pirojil for what they called his stupid heroics.

  But not just to see what it was.

  Pirojil knelt beside him, breathing heavily. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. Yes, he had stamina, that one, both of body and of mind, but he didn't have the woodsman's knack of keeping up a fast pace without tiring. Maybe you had to be born with it.

  He turned to Pirojil, who frowned. I don't like it, either, Pirojil mouthed. Something ahead?

  I think so. Kethol wasn't sure. The meadow was crisscrossed with paths of trampled grasses. Deer? Ore? Man? Some of each?

  Ahira stood beside where they knelt, his chest level with Kethol's eyes for once, instead of the other way around.

  "I smell something," he whispered. "Something rank."

  That wasn't much help. Was it an unbathed man, or an ore? A harsh smell in the forest was the sign of an animal that didn't have a need to hide its scent – try to catch a whiff of rabbit some time! – but it could be a skunk or a boar or a bear as easily as an ore or a man.

  A skunk would be annoying, and a bear would likely flee at the sound of their approach, but boars were mean, and stupid enough to be unafraid. Hunting a boar was not something Kethol would want to do right here and now. Yes, bow and arrow would be fine, if there was a low-branched tree within reach. Even if your first arrow killed it – and that would require a side shot, as even the fastest-driven arrow wouldn't penetrate the bone and gristle and muscle that covered the pig's chest – a boar was too stupid to know that it was dead, and would gladly charge you and rend you with its tusks before it finally keeled over.

  No. They hadn't been trailing a boar. Kethol would have spotted its spoor, and it wouldn't have moved quietly, except by accident.

  He had worked that out, but in doing so he felt disappointed in himself. Surely, somebody with his experience in the woods could do better than figure out that whatever it was, it wasn't a boar.

  "Let's let it go," Pirojil said, his lips close to the dwarf's.

  That was the prudent thing to do, the wise thing to do. And if Kethol didn't know that Pirojil would have imprudently followed him, he would have dashed out into the clearing, trying to draw the attention of whatever-it-was, hoping that his speed and reflexes would save him.

  "No." Ahira shook his head. "Let's finish things here," he whispered, and straightened himself.

  There was something strange about the dwarf's very ordinary-looking roughspun cotton tunic, as he stood, his ax held lightly in one gnarled hand. It took a moment for Kethol to realize what it was: the dwarf wasn't wearing his chainmail armor. That made sense, but it was somehow surprising that Ahira would instantly see the problem with rattling and clanking through the forest, and would leave it behind without a
moment's hesitation, as he must have – particularly considering his short legs – to have kept up with Kethol's pace.

  I can move faster than you'd think, Ahira mouthed. Let me handle it.

  Pirojil frowned. He had little patience with stupidity. That Ahira could run faster than Pirojil would have guessed was probably true, and all to the good. But could he move faster than an ore, a boar, an arrow, or a bullet?

  Asking silly questions was unlikely to improve matters. And there was a real question in Kethol's mind as to whether Ahira would let the two of them overrule him.

  Even if he did – even if Ahira backed down at their insistence – the baron was all too likely to put himself in harm's way, and there would be no arguing with him. Compared to the baron, or the dowager empress, Ahira was as expendable as Erenor.

  The good thing about working with somebody for years is that you don't have to say everything out loud. Pirojil would no more look forward to explaining a dead Ahira to the baron than Kethol would.

  Kethol was a good enough bones player that he could have made something of a living at it, assuming that he could find enough competition, and survive the after-game fight when the competition realized how badly they had been had. It wasn't enough to have a steady hand, and a keen eye, necessary as those were. Sometimes the bones fell against you; sometimes you were two or three moves away from having no play at all. You had to learn how to bluff, to persuade the other guy that he was in the position you were really in, trick him into making a bad play, and watch the bones tumble to the table, looking surprised at the rickitatickitatickita sound.

  So he shook his head and loosened his arrow from the bowstring. "No," he said, his voice more than a whisper, though little more. "Not a good bet," he said, not looking to Pirojil for support – that would have been too obvious, and the wrong way to play this board. "It's too open, we're too far away from help, and there's only three of us."

  For a moment, he honestly didn't know how it would all fall, but then Ahira's wide face split in a grin, and he broke for daylight, his short legs pumping hard, faster than Kethol would have thought possible. The dwarf was right about that, at least; Kethol wouldn't have thought that he could have run so fast.

  "Shut up," Pirojil said.

  Kethol realized that he had been muttering curses and oaths under his breath, so he stopped.

  Ahira dashed across the meadow, not taking more than two or three or four steps straight in any one direction before angling off. If there was somebody trying to line up a rifle or a bow on him, that would make it more difficult. If that somebody was an inexperienced shot, it might well make it impossible.

  "I think he's going to make it," Pirojil said, the unvoiced next question: and, if he does, do we follow him?

  It would be silly to follow – there could be somebody behind the treeline, just waiting for the next fool to dash out into the open. It's what Kethol would have done, if it had been him on stand, waiting. Let the first one go, at least for the moment, and then collect two nice, juicy kills when the others followed. On a good day, Kethol could have the second arrow in the air before the first one struck home.

  The dwarf was barely a manheight from the concealment of the treeline when a feathered bolt seemed to sprout from his thigh in midstride. It didn't slow him for a moment, not until his leg came down. It crumpled beneath him, and he let out a shout as he fell, hard, his ax falling from his hands as he tumbled to the tall grasses.

  Kethol was already in motion, his bow tossed to one side, his quiver of arrows falling from his right shoulder as he shrugged out of the strap to draw his sword with his right hand, while his left reached for the nearest of the brace of pistols on his belt. There had been a motion out of the corner of his eye – he knew where the crossbow-man was.

  Pirojil's boots thumped behind him, and a pair of shots rang out as he ran. From behind him – was Pirojil... ?

  No. Pirojil would no more shoot at Kethol than he would at himself. He was just firing to keep the enemy crossbowman occupied, to give him something to think about besides the two men charging at his hiding place – Kethol had just bet both of their lives that they were charging his hiding place, but the path of the bolt glowed in his mind, sharp and bright like the edge of a knife. It was a race: if they could reach the hunter's stand before he had a chance to recock his crossbow, if the sound of the shots and the image of the two of them charging, running, deep-throated growls coming, unbidden, unsummoned, to their lips, if...

  Kethol fired off his pistol, just as something whisked past his right ear, his neck suddenly wet.

  The pain came a moment later, a fiery stroke that burned him to the bone. But he couldn't stop for pain, he couldn't stop for fear, he couldn't stop for knowing that his gamble had failed, that the crossbowman could not have had half enough time to reload, and that Kethol had not only bitten off more than he himself could chew – Leria, remember me – but had dragged the closest thing to a friend he had ever had along with him.

  He crashed through the brush, brambles clawing at his throat and face, and into a cleared space, no wider than a manheight, where a bowman knelt, trembling fingers pulling back at the string of his crossbow.

  Somehow, somewhere, he had learned to size up an adversary at a glance. The bowman was a tall man, half a head taller than Kethol himself, his blond hair and beardless, flat face suggesting some Salke in his ancestry, or perhaps Kiarian. He wore the dark green tunic and deerskin leggings and buskins of a woodsman, be it a woodsman of Holtun or Bieme or Osgrad or Salket. You could move invisibly through the forest in such clothes, limited only by your silence. You could – and Kethol had – stand motionless in the crotch of an old oak, invisible against green leaves and rough brown bark, the fringes of your leggings helping to break your outline.

  Kethol felt a strange kinship with the taller man as he lunged forward, in full extension, the edge of his sword not pausing for even a heartbeat as it cut through the bowstring, then rose to bury the point deep within the chest, and then, after a quick twist and pull, slash open the other's throat as he charged past. You couldn't stop and congratulate yourself over a quick kill, not in the middle of a fight, not when he didn't know where the other bowman was, not with Ahira down and Pirojil right behind him. He had to keep moving, to find the other –

  Something tangled up his feet and he fell, hard, headlong. He tried to turn it into a roll-and-recovery, just as he would have on the practice ground, but he had been too long a soldier, and too little a woodsman, and what his mind should have remembered without effort, his blood and bones and muscle had forgotten: that the floor of the forest was not a flat and level surface, not a straw-covered parade ground, and he slammed, chest-first, into an upthrust root that knocked the wind out of him.

  He tried to force himself to his knees – first to all fours, then to your feet, and then back to the fight, that was the way of it – but his traitor body refused to cooperate. It was all he could do to try to breathe, to try to suck a puff of air into his lungs, to wave his arms and legs, to try to get them into motion, because in a fight, if you were pinned to the ground by anything, you were no use to yourself or to anybody else. It would be trivially easy for some blade to reach out of the black borders of his narrowing vision, and pin him to the ground, ending any usefulness he might ever have.

  No. It took every bit of strength, every bit of effort, he could muster, but he managed to get his knees and elbows beneath him, and then, distant, disobedient fingers clawing at the rough bark of the tree, to pull himself to his feet.

  He found he could breathe, just a little, as long as he kept the breaths shallow, and didn't try to fill his lungs.

  Not that it mattered much. It was all over. Pirojil wouldn't have been standing over the body of the enemy bowman if it wasn't.

  The big blond man was dead – the shit stink broadcast that into the air, for all to smell – but Pirojil was still Pirojil: he had kicked the dead man's knife to one side, and one of his heavy boot
s rested firmly on the dead man's wrist.

  A sound from the brush sent Kethol stooping to retrieve his sword, but Ahira's voice made the move less urgent.

  "Ta havath," the dwarf shouted, "it's just me. Give me a hand here, eh?"

  Pirojil gave a final, tentative kick to the corpse's head – it left the neck cocked at an impossible angle – and picked up the dead man's sword, using it like a machete to hack a path through to daylight. In a moment, he came back, stooping awkwardly, one of Ahira's thick arms around his waist.

  The bolt had been snapped off – not cut cleanly; Ahira clearly had been rushed – almost flush with the skin, and the wound was still leaking blood, although only slowly. The dwarf followed Kethol's glance at it, then looked down and furrowed his brow for a moment, the thick, ropy muscles in his neck and leg tensed, and the flow of blood stopped.

  The dwarf grinned, but the unusual pastiness of his complexion made the grin a brave lie. 'Try that sometime, eh?" He released his grip on Pirojil to lean against the bole of a tree. Blunt fingers probed at the stub of wood protruding from his leg, then fastened, tightly, and pulled. The stub of bolt, complete with razor-sharp head, slowly eased out of his flesh, darkly wet. He gave it a casual flick, and it stuck in the bark of the tree over Kethol's head. "Better save it. Might want to scratch his partner with it, and see if he thinks it's poisoned, maybe?"

  Pirojil shook his head. "No partner. This one had two crossbows," he said, gesturing with the point of his sword to where first one, then the other lay. "Kethol tripped over the second."

  Kethol's mind was still a bit foggy, and he winced as he brought his hand up to his cheek, and it came away wet with his own blood. No partner. He and Pirojil had killed the assassin, which was better than getting killed by the assassin, no matter how he looked at it, but...

  Ahira knelt down next to the body. "Anybody care to bet we don't find anything to identify him," he said, quickly stripping the tunic and leggings from the corpse. "Be nice to find an identifying ceremonial scar, say, or a tattoo, or a list of prices and targets in a familiar hand..."