Widowmaker

by Peter Morwood

  His Bannerman and as many others of his personal retainers as could force their way into the room were crammed against the walls. Their faces ran the gamut of emotions appropriate to such a situation: shock, grief, horror, anger against whatever had caused their lord’s death, but for the most part no suspicion yet.

  Except in the case of the Bannerman Reth ar’Gyart, whose eyes, narrowed and glittering with active and all too focused rage, followed Bayrd from the moment he entered the room.

  Ar’Gyart was too old, too wise and, Bayrd was willing to believe, too courteous to make any accusations concerning one arluth’s involvement in the secret murder of another. Most men of any rank and honour would have followed Dyrek ar’Kelayr’s example and fallen on their own daggers rather than be involved in such a deed.

  If two enemies couldn’t live under the light of the same sun, then there were duels, or feuds, or even clan-wars by which they could do something about it. Such attempts at killing had at least had the virtue, if killing had any, of being open and honest. The reasons were known to all, even if those reasons were poor ones. Defiance was offered, challenges given and accepted, and when all was over the victor’s own honour wouldn’t permit him to glory over the survivors of the vanquished.

  That, at least, in a perfect world with men of perfect honour and respect. Even in an imperfect world, it did not permit the hidden dagger in the dark, or the subtle poison dropped covertly into food or drink.

  But this was just such an imperfect world, and there was always a first time. Ar’Gyart had been there last night, a witness to something Bayrd suspected the big man didn’t fully understand. But unless Vanek had explained matters more fully, and from the look on the Bannerman’s face no such words had been exchanged, all ar’Gyart knew for certain was that Bayrd Talvalin had killed, or at least engineered the death of, his lord’s son.

  So why not the lord as well?

  As Bayrd watched the kailin glowering down at him – there was a full head of difference in their height – he knew ar’Gyart had to be convinced of his innocence. And the task wasn’t going to be easy.

  “Get all these people out of here,” Eskra told the big man. Bayrd glanced hurriedly at his wife, then at the Bannerman, and to his astonishment saw Reth ar’Gyart’s expression of unwavering anger and distrust flicker like a windblown candle-flame at the sound of the command. She was a woman, she was a wizard, she was the wife of an enemy and she was an Elthanek. Yet there was something about the way she gave the order that indicated she never dreamed that he would disobey. A senior Bannerman respected that, whatever its source. But he hesitated all the same, and Eskra shot him a look that was halfway between severity and sympathy.

  “Go on,” she said, making shooing motions as if to chickens, cats or children. “Go on. I’m sorry. Truly. But there’s nothing you can do.”

  “They will go,” ar’Gyart muttered, dismissing the others with a jerk of his thumb towards the doorway. “I will stay.”

  “I…” Bayrd could hear Eskra weighing up the likelihood of successfully insisting, and saw her one-shouldered shrug as she threw the notion out. “As you wish.”

  “What are you going to do?” That was Marc ar’Dru from the doorway, a slightly nauseated twist to his mouth. He was a capable warrior, but even after all these years he was still squeamish about coldly-spilled blood, whether by violence or the activities of a surgeon.

  “Nothing unpleasant,” said Eskra over her shoulder. “Nothing that – have you sent for Master ar’Uwin yet?”

  “On his way, my lady.”

  “Good. He can do whatever else is necessary. With your permission, Reth-eir,” she said to the Bannerman, bending over the corpse and beginning all the small, compassionate, useless actions done by someone unwilling to believe the dead are dead until they prove it for themselves. The pressure of finger at neck and wrist, searching for a long-stilled pulse. The hand held lightly at mouth or nose, in the hope of a faint trace of breath clouding the jewelled surface of a ring. The raising of an eyelid, in case there might be the merest flicker of life. And it was then that Bayrd saw her catch her breath.

  “Ar’Uwin is…?” asked ar’Gyart. Bayrd stepped in quickly, giving Eskra time to recover and conceal any further reaction to whatever she had seen.

  “Dunrath’s physician,” he said, “and a good one.” The glower immediately came back to Reth ar’Gyart’s face, dropping into place like the war-mask on a battle helm and looking just as impenetrable.

  “Don’t mock me,” he growled. “What use is a physician now?”

  “I’d like to know how your lord died,” said Eskra quietly, though Bayrd was beginning to suspect she already knew. “That way we can make a start on learning who killed him.”

  Then she raised one finger under the Bannerman’s nose as he drew breath for a reply. “And as for you, right now you will say nothing. You might have fewer apologies to make that way. Now. Lift him up, please.”

  “Don’t you already know?” asked Marc, knowing it would sound better coming from him than from Reth ar’Gyart. “How he died, that is?”

  Eskra flared up slightly, the only sign of strain that had so far ruffled her composure. “Dammit, Marc,” she snapped,

  “that’s why I sent for ar’Uwin. Now if you can’t talk sense, be quiet.”

  They all watched as ar’Gyart raised Vanek’s corpse from the floor as though it weighed no more than a child. No, not a child, thought Bayrd. A doll. A wooden doll. No child had skin so pale, limbs so inflexible.

  “Stop,” said Eskra abruptly. “Wait.” She bent forward and brushed a lock of Vanek’s hair away from the nape of his neck. It hung loose, untied from its warrior’s braid, so the man had been preparing for bed when…

  Whatever it was had happened.

  Then Bayrd heard Marc swallow hard, because what Eskra had revealed made a ghastly contrast with the tallow-pale face above it. It was a great blotch of purple bruise, mottled greenish where it met the paler skin. The discolouration began within the dead man’s hairline, extended across the back of his neck and finally ran down out of sight beneath the collar of his shirt and tunic.

  Bayrd cringed inwardly at the weight of whatever blow could leave a mark like that, and at the same time wondered how anyone could have delivered it without being heard. Even during the frantic activity of getting here, he had noticed – with a little surge of respect for the man’s old-fashioned ideals – that despite being given a room of his own in the guesting-suite, there was a heap of blankets by the door. While his lord had been under an enemy’s roof, ar’Gyart had been his guard and slept across his threshold.

  “So. Thank you, Reth-eir. If you would just lay him on the bed. . .” There was no change in Eskra’s voice, no trace of shock that she had just seen where a man’s spine had been smashed, and finally Bayrd could bear it no longer.

  “Who could have hit him so hard?” he said.

  “Hit him?”

  “There.” He pointed, not with just one finger but with his whole hand. “There, on the neck. Where the bruise is, dammit!”

  “Nobody.”

  “But…”

  “Hush,” said Eskra, leaning over the body and attempting very gently to move the dead man’s jaw. “Perhaps,” she murmured to herself, taking a pillow and trying to press it up under Vanek’s chin. Then she shook her head.

  “I can’t close his mouth yet,” she told ar’Gyart. “Not without hurt…” She caught the useless word half spoken and smiled a wincing little smile. “It always takes time to remember. But the rigor will ease. Then give him his dignity back.”

  “The bruise, ’Skra-ain,” said Bayrd. “What about the bruise?”

  “That,” she said, straightening, “is a stain, not a bruise. The blood stopped in his veins when he died. And without life to move it, it sank. Drained downward. Quite normal.”

  “Normal…” Marc ar’Dru’s was a tremulous whisper, and Eskra gave him, then Bayrd, and finally ar’Gyart, the sa
me sweeping, scornful stare.

  “When you gentlemen kill, you should wait a while. A few days. See what happens to the dead meat you leave behind you. It might make you less ready to do it again.” Wearily she scrubbed the knuckles of both fists into her eye-sockets, perhaps in the hope that she would feel more awake, but from the look of her face when she finished, it didn’t work. “At least it tells me that he died where we found him.”

  “But when did he die?”

  Eskra straightened up. “Cold. Stiff. Livid.” Her lips moved in silent calculation, and then she nodded. “Yes. I’m quite certain. Lord Vanek ar’Kelayr died at some time between when we last saw him and when someone discovered the body.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “What am I? Some sort of magician?”

  “Certainly not a comedian. Eskra, there’s a time and place for everything, even bad jokes. But not here, and not now.”

  “Why not? This comes to all of us, sooner or later. And Vanek was laughing last night when he left us. For the first time in a long while, I think. I’d like to remember that. And anyway,” she met ar’Gyart’s dubious gaze and held it with her own, “I know we didn’t kill this man. You know it. Marc knows it. Perhaps even Reth-eir knows it. So who did?”

  “And how…?”

  Eskra Talvalin glanced at Bayrd. “That much is obvious. You saw me. I knew straight away that… I think I must have known all the time. Even before I saw. I’ve been trying to pretend that I was wrong. But,” once more she eased the dead man’s eyelid open with her fingertips, “how else? Except by the Art.”

  Bayrd stared, and felt his headache and his queasy stomach fade amidst the shiver of reaction at what he saw. There was no white to Vanek’s eye, and no pupil, just a smooth, featureless surface that reflected like a mirror. But a mirror that was cracked from side to side by a ragged star-shaped fracture. It was as if someone had silvered an eggshell, and polished it – and then for some reason rammed a thumb straight through the centre. A score of Bayrd Talvalins looked back at him from the splintered surface, impossibly small, impossibly helpless, impossibly far away.

  And then he heard the voice. It was inside his ears, inside his skull, as much a part of him as life and blood and breath, and it began to whisper, as enticing – and as deadly – as a vat of molten gold.

  All the world is fractured, it said, a suave, sympathetic purr straight into his mind, and all the light is running out of it. What you see is the reality of today and all of your tomorrows. This is all that life now is, and all that life will ever be. Without me. Without me…

  Without whatever power lurked like a coiled serpent behind that persuasive voice, all the hopes and dreams of human existence would be reduced to nothing more significant than these shocked, minuscule faces. Bayrd and everything he knew and loved would become nothing but reflections in a shattered mirror…

  Bayrd felt sick. He had watched only three men killed by magic before, and Eskra herself had slain two of them, both quite literally with her bare hand. Gerin ar’Diskan’s uncle had collapsed when his life was eaten by a green flare of sorcery that only Bayrd ever admitted having seen. Eskra had killed on the first occasion to save herself from an armoured Prytenek warrior, smashing a palm-sized hole through his chest with no more effort than swatting a fly, and then again in mercy, this time to save a mortally crippled man from the pain she had no other power to ease.

  But none of those deaths had ever looked like this, or made Bayrd feel like this. They might have been more destructive, more gruesome to look at, but they hadn’t carried the same cold grey weight of bleak despair. Only the voice promised an alternative. Only the voice, fading now as if into a great distance, had any choices to set against the desolation, and even though they were unspoken, Bayrd knew they had to be better than…

  His hackles rose.

  It was a phrase he had often heard in storymakers’ tales to describe the onset of sudden terror, and it was something he thought he’d experienced more than once himself: that shiver of apprehension starting at his neck and running like cold water all along his spine. Bayrd was wrong.

  What he felt now was no shiver, but the clear and distinct feeling of every hair of his body standing on end like the fur of an enraged cat. It was a sensation like no other, shocking in its suddenness, in the crawling sensation that spread over his skin beneath his clothing, in the sudden onset of tremors in the pit of his stomach and a clammy chill on hands and face that he had felt only before a battle. He felt as though he was about to fight something for his life – or equally, run from it in terror.

  And just as suddenly, as abruptly as a snapped thread once the voice at last fell silent, the feeling was gone again, and he was able to look at Vanek’s body – and even the solitary gaze of that appalling eye – with nothing more intense than regret.

  Other eyes were looking at him. Reth ar’Gyart was as scared as any man might be, after encountering the strangeness about Clan Talvalin that he had long suspected and finding it all too real. Marc ar’Dru looked startled, as though Bayrd had done something possible but unlikely – at which Bayrd looked almost by instinct for the betraying blue sparks of sorcery drizzling like sapphire raindrops from his clenched fists, and saw none.

  Eskra merely looked concerned. “It is an outrage to any lord of this Land, whether his clan be high or low or House or Family, that any man who was once an enemy and who might have been a friend should be slain secretly while a guest beneath his roof,” she said to no-one in particular. Just the formal mode and manner of her statement was enough to make her the new focus of attention.

  For seven years, more or less, Eskra Talvalin an-purkanyath, the wizard, the lady spellsinger whose craft placed so much value on the weight and meaning of words, had spoken in staccato sentences as though those words were jewels of great price, not to be strewn broadcast without reason. Her brief, brittle phrases had become as distinctive as her pretty red-haired kestrel’s face, as the blue and white of her husband’s Colours, as the silver spread-winged eagle of his crest.

  That she should adopt such a long-winded delivery – that she had breath to finish the sentence without gasping was a wonder in itself – had the same effect, even on ar’Gyart, as though she’d found a table and then thumped her fist on it for emphasis. Bayrd and Marc, far more familiar with her normal mode of speech, were astonished. If she had ripped off a string of the foulest oaths it would have surprised them less, since the Lady Eskra with her finger shut in a door – as had happened in the past – was as likely to give vent to her feelings as anyone else. Though probably in more languages…

  “Reth-an,” she said, attaching that token of tentative friendship to his name for the first time, “of your courtesy, go find Master ar’Uwin. We no longer need him.”

  “And my lord…?”

  “Is safe,” said Bayrd quietly, looking at the dead man again. The spirit was flown and only the husk remained. Nothing that might be done to it could hurt Vanek ar’Kelayr any more. “Reth ar’Gyart, trust us – trust me – this far at least. Your lord came here as an enemy because of the death of his son. He left us last night convinced that what had happened was not the fault of Clan Talvalin. You were there. You saw.

  Had he lived longer he might have become a friend.” Bayrd shrugged, dismissing the maybe that would never happen now. “Who knows? Even an ally. And that’s why he was killed.”

  The big Bannerman stood where he was for several seconds, beside the bed that bore his lord, staring at Bayrd. Not glowering, now; just staring, balancing the lies and the truths and the ambiguous statements against what he thought himself. Then his right arm came up and slammed through the movements of a perfect high salute. That was all. He said nothing to Bayrd, nothing to Marc, and merely bowed his head respectfully to Eskra before stalking out of the room.

  She nodded acknowledgement and watched him go, and only when the door had closed behind him did she draw in a long breath and release it in a slow, whistling exh
alation through her teeth. “A good warrior, that one,” she said, “and a faithful retainer. But he frightens me like few men I’ve ever met.”

  Once said aloud, the others could agree, even though rank and dignity wouldn’t have allowed either of them to admit that Reth had left them feeling the same way. The older Bannermen, of which he was one, were not creatures of reason, swayed by explanations. Those were just words, and what were words but breath so often wasted on the air? Their sole currency was honour, and Alban honour could often be very blind to truth. Seeing Reth ar’Gyart salute and take his leave was like innocent prisoners confined in a cell watching the block and the axe picked up and put away unused, aware all the time that if the axe fell wrongly, it would be unfortunate – but not something that could be put right.

  In this life, at least.

  Yes. In this life. Even if there was no possibility now that Vanek ar’Kelayr could be an ally, there was a chance where his Bannerman was concerned. If the big man’s distrust had been disarmed – and since the more subtle of his emotions were as easy to read as those of a block of wood, Bayrd wasn’t at all sure about that – then he might well help the Clan-Lord Talvalin take revenge on whoever had attempted to foul his name with the stain of murder.

  Or he might not. There weren’t enough people to blame, even though Bayrd’s mind kept swinging with the inevitability of a compass needle back towards Gerin ar’Diskan. Gerin was Vanek’s rival for land and power; he was Bayrd’s enemy for… For more reasons than seemed sensible, and sheer spite not the least of them. But was he willing to give his support to someone like Kalarr cu Ruruc? A year ago Bayrd would have said not. And now…?

  Now he couldn’t be so sure of anything any more.

  * * * *

  “I don’t know if it’s Kalarr, or if it’s Gerin, or if it’s both of them,” said Bayrd Talvalin, moving pens and inkwells and sandcasters over the surface of the table, for all the world like an old general reconstructing a long-ago campaign. The remnants of the midday meal lay on its plates and dishes, the clean-picked bones of the slain. More chicken, the leftovers from last night cooked up in different ways, and a great deal of wine.