The demon felt her waver—and in that moment of weakness, exerted his power on the bond that made her Kal'enedral.
And Tarma realized at that instant that Thalhkarsh was truly on the verge of attaining godlike powers, for she felt the bond weaken—
Thalhkarsh frowned at the unexpected resistance he encountered, then turned his full attention to breaking the stubborn strength of the bond.
And that changing of the focus of his attention in turn released Tarma from her entrapment. Not much—but enough for her to act.
Tarma had resisted the demon with every ounce of stubbornness in her soul, augmenting the strength of the bond, but she wasn't blind to what was going on around her.
And to her horror she saw Kethry creeping up on the demon's back, a fierce and stubborn anger in her eyes.
Tarma knew that no blow the sorceress struck would do more than anger Thalhkarsh. She decided to yield the tiniest bit, timing her moment of weakness with care, waiting until the instant Need was poised to strike at the demon's unprotected back.
And as Thalhkarsh's magical grip loosened, her own blade-hand snapped out, hilt foremost, to strike and break the demon's focus-bottle.
At the exact moment Tarma moved, Kethry buried Need to the hilt in the demon's back, as the sound of breaking glass echoed and re-echoed the length and breadth of the temple.
Any one of those actions, by itself, might not have been sufficient to defeat him; but combined—
Thalhkarsh screamed in pain, unanticipated, unexpected, and all the worse for that. He felt at the same moment a good half of his stored power flowing out of him like water from a broken bottle—
—a broken bottle!
His focus—was gone!
And pain like a red-hot iron seared through him, shaking him to the roots of his being.
He lost his carefully cultivated control.
His focus was destroyed, and with it, the power he had been using to hold his followers in thrall. And the pain—it could not destroy him, but he was not used to being the recipient of pain. It took him by surprise, and broke his concentration and cost him yet more power.
He lost mastery of his form. He took on his true demonic aspect—as horrifying as he had been beautiful.
And now his followers saw for the first time the true appearance of what they had been calling a god. Their faith had been shaken when he did nothing to save the life of his High Priest. Now it was destroyed by the panic they felt on seeing what he was.
They screamed, turned mindlessly, and attempted to flee.
His storehouse of power was gone. His other power-source was fleeing madly in fear. His focus was destroyed, and he was racked with pain, he who had never felt so much as a tiny pinprick before. Every spell he had woven fell to ruins about him.
Thalhkarsh gave a howling screech that rose until the sound was nearly unbearable; he again slapped Kethry into the wall. Somehow she managed to take her blade with her, but this time her limp unconsciousness as she slid down the wall was not feigned.
He howled again, burst into a tower of red and green flame, and the walls began to shift.
Tarma dodged past him and dragged Kethry under the heavy marble slab of the altar, then made a second trip to drag Warrl under its dubious shelter.
The ground shook, and the remaining devotees rushed in panic-stricken confusion from one hoped-for exit to another. The ceiling groaned with a living voice, and the air was beginning to cloud with a sulfurous fog. Then cracks appeared in the roof, and the trapped worshipers screeched hopelessly as it began to crumble and fall in on them.
Tarma crouched beneath the altar stone, protecting the bodies of Kethry and Warrl with her own—and hoped the altar was strong enough to shelter them as the temple began falling to ruins around them.
It seemed like an eternity, but it couldn't have been more than an hour or two before dawn that they crawled out from under the battered slab, pushing and digging rubble out of the way with hands that were soon cut and bleeding. Warrl did his best to help, but his claws and paws were meant for climbing and clinging, not digging; and besides that, he was suffering from more than one cracked rib. Eventually Tarma made him stop trying to help before he lamed himself.
"Feh," she said distastefully, when they emerged. The stone—or whatever it was—that the building had been made of was rotting away, and the odor was overpowering. She heaved herself wearily up onto the cleaner marble of the altar and surveyed the wreckage about them.
"Gods—to think I wanted to do this quietly! Well, is it gone, I wonder, or did we just chase it away for a while?"
Kethry crawled up beside her, wincing. "I can't tell; there's too many factors involved. I don't think Need is a demon-killer, but I don't know everything there is to know about her. Did we get rid of him because he lost the faith of his devotees, because you broke the focus, because of the wound I gave him, or all three? And does it matter? He won't be able to return unless he's called, and I can't imagine anyone wanting to call him, not for a long, long time." She paused, then continued. "You had me frightened, she'enedra."
"Whyfor?"
"I didn't know what he was offering you in return for your services. I was afraid if he could see your heart—"
"He didn't offer me anything I really wanted, dearling. I was never in any danger. All he wanted to give me was a face and figure to match his own."
"But if he'd offered you your Clan and your voice back—" Kethry replied soberly.
"I still wouldn't have been in any danger," Tarma replied with a little more force than she intended. "My people are dead, and no demon could bring them back to life. They've gone on elsewhere and he could never touch them. And without them—" she made a tiny, tired shrug, "—without them, what use is my voice—or for that matter, the most glorious face and body, and all the power in the universe?"
"I thought he had you for a moment—"
"So did he. He was trying to break my bond with the Star-Eyed. What he didn't know was all he was arousing was my disgust. I'd die before I'd give in to something that uses people as casually as that thing did."
Kethry got her belt and sheath off Warrl and slung Need in her accustomed place on her hip. Tarma suppressed the urge to giggle, despite pain and weariness. Kethry, in the sorceress' robes she usually wore, and belted with a blade looked odd enough. Kethry, dressed in three spangles and a scrap of cloth and wearing the sword looked totally absurd.
Nevertheless Tarma copied her example. "Well, that damn goatsticker of yours got us into another one we won't get paid for," she said in more normal tones, fastening the buckle so that her sword hung properly on her back. "Bloody Hell! If you count in the ale we had to pour and the bribes we had to pay, we lost money on this one."
"Don't be so certain of that, she'enedra." Kethry's face was exhausted and blood-streaked, one of her eyes was blackened and swelling shut and she had livid bruises all over her body. On top of that she was covered in dust, and filthy, sweat-lank locks of hair were straggling into her face. But despite all of that, her eyes still held a certain amusement. "In case you hadn't noticed, these little costumes of ours are real gold and gems. We happen to be wearing a small fortune in jewelry."
"Warrior's Truth!" Tarma looked a good deal more closely at her scanty attire, and discovered her partner was right. She grinned with real satisfaction. "I guess I owe that damn blade of yours an apology."
"Only," Kethry grinned back, "If we get back into our own clothing before dawn."
"Why dawn?"
"Because that's when the rightful owners of these trinkets are likely to wake up. I don't think they'd let us keep them when we're found here if they know we have them."
"Good point—but why should we want anyone to know we're responsible for this mess?"
"Because when the rest of the population scrapes up enough nerve to find out what happened, we're going to be heroines—or at least we will until they find out how many of their fathers and brothers and husbands were trapp
ed here tonight. By then, we'll be long gone. Even if they don't reward us—and they might, for delivering the town from a demon—our reputation has just been made!"
Tarma's jaw dropped as she realized the truth of that. "Shek," she said. "Turn me into a sheep! You're right!" She threw back her head and laughed into the morning sky. "Now all we need is the fortune and a king's blessing!"
"Don't laugh, oathkin," Kethry replied with a grin. "We just might get those, and sooner than you think. After all, aren't we demon-slayers?"
Eight
Someone wrote a song about it—but that was later. Much later—when the dust and dirt were gone from the legend. When the sweat and blood were only memories, and the pain was less than that. And when the dead were all but forgotten except to their own.
"Deep into the stony hills
Miles from keep or hold,
A troop of guards comes riding
With a lady and her gold.
Riding in the center,
Shrouded in her cloak of fur
Companioned by a maiden
And a toothless, aged cur."
"And every pack-train we've sent out for the past two months has vanished without a trace—and without survivors," the silk merchant Grumio concluded, twisting an old iron ring on one finger. "Yet the decoy trains were allowed to reach their destinations unmolested. It's uncanny—and if it goes on much longer, we'll be ruined."
In the silence that followed his words, he studied the odd pair of mercenaries before him. He knew very well that they knew he was doing so. Eventually there would be no secrets in this room—eventually. But he would parcel his out as if they were bits of his heart—and he knew they would do the same. It was all part of the bargaining process.
Neither of the two women seemed in any great hurry to reply to his speech. The crackle of the fire behind him in this tiny private eating room sounded unnaturally loud in the absence of conversation. Equally loud were the steady whisking of a whetstone on blade-edge, and the muted murmur of voices from the common room of the inn beyond their closed door.
The whetstone was being wielded by the swordswoman, Tarma by name, who was keeping to her self-appointed task with an indifference to Grumio's words that might—or might not—be feigned. She sat across the table from him, straddling her bench in a position that left him mostly with a view of her back and the back of her head. What little he might have been able to see of her face was screened by her unruly shock of coarse black hair. He was just as glad of that; there was something about her cold, expressionless, hawklike face with its wintry blue eyes that sent shivers up his spine. "The eyes of a killer," whispered one part of him. "Or a fanatic."
The other partner cleared her throat and he gratefully turned his attention to her. Now there was a face a man could easily rest his eyes on! She faced him squarely, this sorceress called Kethry, leaning slightly forward on her folded arms, placing her weight on the table between them. The light from the fire and the oil lamp on their table fell fully on her. A less canny man than Grumio might be tempted to dismiss her as being very much the weaker, the less intelligent of the two; she was always soft of speech, her demeanor refined and gentle. She was very attractive; sweet-faced and quite conventionally pretty, with hair like the finest amber and eyes of beryl-green. It would have been very easy to assume that she was no more than the swordswoman's vapid tagalong. A lover perhaps—maybe one with the right to those magerobes she wore, but surely of no account in the decision-making.
That would have been the assessment of most men. But as he'd spoken, Grumio had now and then caught a disquieting glimmer in those calm green eyes. She had been listening quite carefully, and analyzing what she heard. He had not missed the fact that she, too, bore a sword. And not for the show of it, either—that blade had a well-worn scabbard that spoke of frequent use. More than that, what he could see of the blade showed that it was well-cared-for.
The presence of that blade in itself was an anomaly; most sorcerers never wore more than an eating knife. They simply hadn't the time—or the inclination—to attempt studying the arts of the swordsman. To Grumio's eyes the sword looked very odd and quite out-of-place, slung over the plain, buff-colored, calf-length robe of a wandering sorceress.
A puzzlement; altogether a puzzlement.
"I presume," Kethry said when he turned to face her, "that the road patrols have been unable to find your bandits."
She had in turn been studying the merchant; he interested her. In his own way he was as much of an anomaly as she and Tarma were. There was muscle beneath the fat of good living, and old sword calluses on his hands. This was no born-and-bred merchant, not when he looked to be as much retired mercenary as trader. And unless she was wildly mistaken, there was also a sharp mind beneath that balding skull. He knew they didn't come cheaply; since the demon-god affair their reputation had spread, and their fees had become quite respectable. They were even able—like Ikan and Justin—to pick and choose to some extent. On the surface this business appeared far too simple a task—one would simply gather a short-term army and clean these brigands out. On the surface, this was no job for a specialized team like theirs—and Grumio surely knew that. It followed then that there was something more to this tale of banditry than he was telling.
Kethry studied him further. Certain signs seemed to confirm this surmise; he looked as though he had not slept well of late, and there seemed to be a shadow of deeper sorrow upon him than the loss of mere goods would account for.
She wondered how much he really knew of them, and she paid close attention to what his answer to her question would be.
Grumio snorted his contempt for the road patrols. "They rode up and down for a few days, never venturing off the Trade Road, and naturally found nothing. Over-dressed, over-paid, under-worked arrogant idiots!"
Kethry toyed with a fruit left from their supper, and glanced up at the hound-faced merchant through long lashes that veiled her eyes and her thoughts. The next move would be Tarma's.
Tarma heard her cue, and made her move. "Then guard your pack-trains, merchant, if guards keep these vermin hidden."
He started; her voice was as harsh as a raven's, and startled those not used to hearing it. One corner of Tarma's mouth twitched slightly at his reaction. She took a perverse pleasure in using that harshness as a kind of weapon. A Shin'a'in learned to fight with many weapons, words among them. Kal'enedral learned the finer use of those weapons.
Grumio saw at once the negotiating ploy these two had evidently planned to use with him. The swordswoman was to be the antagonizer, the sorceress the sympathizer. His respect for them rose another notch. Most freelance mercenaries hadn't the brains to count their pay, much less use subtle bargaining tricks. Their reputation was plainly well-founded. He just wished he knew more of them than their reputation; he was woefully short a full hand in this game. Why, he didn't even know where the sorceress hailed from, or what her School was!
Be that as it may, once he saw the trick, he had no intention of falling for it.
"Swordlady," he said patiently, as though to a child, "to hire sufficient force requires we raise the price of goods above what people are willing to pay."
As he studied them further, he noticed something else about them that was distinctly odd. There was a current of communication and understanding running between these two that had him thoroughly puzzled. He dismissed without a second thought the notion that they might be lovers, the signals between them were all wrong for that. No, it was something else, something more complicated than that. Something that you wouldn't expect between a Shin'a'in swordswoman and an outClansman—something perhaps, that only someone like he was, with experience in dealing with Shin'a'in, would notice in the first place.
Tarma shook her head impatiently at his reply. "Then cease your inter-house rivalries, kadessa, and send all your trains together under a single large force."
A new ploy—now she was trying to anger him a little—to get him off-guard by insulting
him. She had called him a kadessa, a little grasslands beast that only the Shin'a'in ever saw, a rodent so notoriously greedy that it would, given food enough, eat itself to death; and one that was known for hoarding anything and everything it came across in its nest-tunnels.
Well it wasn't going to work. He refused to allow the insult to distract him. There was too much at stake here. "Respect, Swordlady," he replied with a hint of reproachfulness, "but we tried that, too. The beasts of the train were driven off in the night, and the guards and traders were forced to return afoot. This is desert country, most of it, and all they dared burden themselves with was food and drink."
"Leaving the goods behind to be scavenged. Huh. Your bandits are clever, merchant," the swordswoman replied thoughtfully. Grumio thought he could sense her indifference lifting.
"You mentioned decoy trains?" Kethry interjected.
"Yes, lady." Grumio's mind was still worrying away at the puzzle these two presented. "Only I and the men in the train knew which were the decoys and which were not, yet the bandits were never deceived, not once. We had taken extra care that all the men in the train were known to us, too."
A glint of gold on the smallest finger of Kethry's left hand finally gave him the clue he needed, and the crescent scar on the palm of that hand confirmed his surmise. He knew without looking that that swordswoman would have an identical scar and ring. These two had sword Shin'a'in bloodoath, the oath of she'enedran; the strongest bond known to that notoriously kin-conscious race. The blood-oath made them closer than sisters, closer than lovers—so close they sometimes would think as one. In fact, the word she'enedran was sometimes translated as "two-made-one."
"So who was it that passed judgment on your estimable guards?" Tarma's voice was heavy with sarcasm.
"I did, or my fellow merchants, or our own personal guards. No one was allowed on the trains but those who had served us in the past or were known to those who had."
He waited in silence for them to make reply.
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