by RW Krpoun
Mane missed Tryza, though: none of his new guards were suitable for active participation in his rest periods, and in any case this new headquarters was much smaller and more cramped that the Golden Cartographers had been, leaving no scope for the innovative entertainment that he had been enjoying.
Kroh went through the doorway first, axe ready, but the small cellar was unoccupied, which was a good thing as the small room was so jammed with supplies and equipment that it took the Waybrother three tries to get the door open far enough to allow him passage. One by one the Badgers slipped into the crowded cellar as Kroh eased up the stout staircase and listened at the door. Henri joined him, and ran his hands over the frame, muttering softly. “Nothing, not locked or trapped.”
“I hear voices, two or three, and people moving around,” Kroh hissed back. “They’re still working, some of ‘em, anyway.”
“What do you want to do?”
Kroh gave that some thought. “Elonia,” he whispered over his shoulder. When the Seeress joined them, he briefly explained the situation. “You two are the quietest of this detail, so you go in first and see how far you can get before the alarm is raised. Here, Elonia, take a flash-egg, use it when the dance starts, and we’ll be in right behind you. Try to find Mane, if that’s possible; there’s less than twenty in there, most asleep.”
“Give me a minute,” Elonia muttered, pulling her manoples from where they had been thrust into the back of her belt. The Opatian weapons consisted of a short sword blade attached to a forearm bracer, the double-edged blade extending out over the tops of the hands for eighteen inches, flanked by outwardly-curving steel prongs for the first six inches, the prongs being used for parrying and trapping enemy blades. The Seeress strapped the two weapons in place and removed their sheaths. “All right, I’m ready.”
Kroh eased the door open just wide enough for the two Badgers to slip past, then pulled it nearly shut, leaving himself a crack to peer through.
The book-factory consisted of a ground floor and a loft of the same size; the ground floor was split into four roughly equal sections by chest-high partitions, one section each devoted to page-trimming, cover-making, assembly, and a shop for mixing inks, paints, and glue. The loft served as an office and apprentice’s quarters while the cellar was used for storage. Since the place had become the Hand headquarters the heaviest of the tools of book-making were left in place but the ground floor rooms had become crowded with tables and book-racks filled with documents, and the loft sleeping quarters now served Hand staff officers and clerk-messengers.
Elonia slipped out of the cellar onto what had been the assembly room; the section was empty, although candle-light and the sounds of movement could be heard and seen in the other sections. Henri tossed her a salute and slipped off to the right; shifting her arms to seat the manoples more comfortably, she eased off to the left.
Peeking around a partition’s corner, she saw a man in a mail shirt dozing in a chair next to the barred main doors, an axe in his belt and a loaded and cocked crossbow in his lap. Two clerks were drinking tea and working on paperwork in the page-cutting area. A stairs led to a square hole in the ceiling, the entry to the sleeping area in the loft. The Seeress studied the loft and the hole the stairway passed through, taking careful note of the shadows that enveloped the exposed beams in the ceiling, the clerks’ lamps doing little to dispel the overall darkness in the room.
Elonia had some into her Arts late in life, which accounted for her very limited abilities, but she did know a slender number of useful spells; easing along the partition to a point on line with the loft-opening, she whispered a short cant and proceeded to crawl to the partition, pulling her now-weightless body up the lath hand over-hand in the manner of a swimmer. Aware that it was swift movement that most readily catches the eyes, she eased over the partition and slid up behind a ceiling beam with a slow, carefully controlled stretch-and-tuck.
Pausing a second, she slid over the beam and wiggled between two risers on the stairs, careful not to knock the hilts of her yataghans against the wood, mouthing silent curses when an exposed nail-point raked a line of fire across one thigh. She slipped through the hole and flattened herself on the plank flooring of the loft as her body steadily regained its natural weight.
When the spell had expired she gestured with two fingers and muttered a long word; shadows across her body deepened and clung to her, causing her to blend into the darkness. It was far from perfect but it would protect her from a casual glance.
The sleeping quarters was simply a long room under the eaves with cots lining the walls and a rack of washbasins at one end. A few tables filled the center aisle, and a doorway with a sliver of light under it was at the other end. About two-thirds of the twenty cots were occupied, and the air was thick with the odors of too many people living too close together.
She lay on the dirty boards and listened to the snoring and sleep-sounds coming from the rows of cots for several seconds before rising to all fours and creeping into and down, the central aisle, heading for the light coming from under the door. Just as she was passing the last cot she felt the enchantment leaving her and wished she had started developing her skills at a younger age. Slipping to the side of the portal, she cursed silently as she heard the man in the cot next to her stir and wake.
Before he could speak she caught his right hand, careful to use only her fingertips so as to conceal the manople-straps that crossed her palm, and placed it upon her left breast. The man chuckled softly as his fingers squeezed gently, then froze as a realization set in. It was too late, however: Elonia had trailed her fingers down his bare arm as she drew a throwing knife with the other; as he suddenly stiffened with the realization that the woman kneeling next to his bed was not the one he expected the Seeress stabbed him squarely in the throat, the poisoned point severing his windpipe.
Draping her body across his chest, Elonia clamped one hand across his mouth and nose while pinning his left arm with her torso, her left foot immobilizing his right hand. His venom-induced seizure and death-throes jerked and shook the cot; the mixed-blood Badger deadened the trashing as much as she could while audibly grunting and gasping more or less in time to the dying man’s movements.
The man in the next cot rolled over and adjusted his thin pillow. “You two need to give it a rest,” he muttered, and someone nearby chuckled.
Henri watched the cover-making shop, where a staff officer and two clerks, one a woman, were working on some project, while a armed and armored guard sat at the back door and worked his way through a pot of tea. The wizard had sensed Elonia’s mild spell-use and deduced that she was going into the sleeping area overhead. Mane seemed to be at work as well, to judge from the light that leaked out around the trap door at the head of the stairs. Behind Henri Kroh was bringing the rest of the raiders out one at a time. The wizard had no intention of starting things unless the Waybrother ordered him to; Elonia was up to something, while he himself was out of options: it would be impossible to silently kill the four Hand operatives before him. Someone else was going to have to get the ball rolling.
Fortunately, the poison was fast-acting, all the more so for the blade’s mortal wound, and the charade quickly tapered off. Someone muttered something, and another man chuckled; Elonia eased up off the corpse, hoping to have pulled off the deception, until a man suddenly sat bolt upright halfway down the opposite row of cots.
“Minna, what are you doing up here?” he demanded in a voice of authority. “You’re supposed to be on duty downstairs.”
She clapped the egg between her hands, remembering to close her eyes beforehand, and slammed her shoulder into the door even as the loft echoed with shouts and the sounds of bodies tumbling from cots.
Rolf had crept to the corner of the partition and was watching the page-cutting area as the others slipped out of the cellar, crossbow in hand and his dirks loose in their sheaths as Moonblade too long for this sort of work. Since Henri was off to the right of the cellar doorway, he
guessed that Elonia had somehow gotten up into the sleeping-loft, and was keeping an eye on the inky opening. The sudden flash of light across the loft startled him, but not enough to immobilize him; as the clerks jumped at the sudden outburst of shouting overhead the big Corporal shot the sentry cleanly in the chest and charged into the room, smashing one clerk off his feet with the butt of his crossbow. Hurling the empty weapon into the other clerk’s face, he raced up the stairs, drawing his dirks as he ran.
A chubby woman in a sweaty slip, her lank hair radiating out into a walnut halo around her head and Hand tattoos standing out on her left arm, leapt at him as he came up through the floor, a short sword in her hand, but before she could strike eleven pounds of enraged cave rat slammed into her face. Dropping her sword, the Markan-Fet staggered backwards, tripping over a cot and crashing to the floor as she screamed and struck at the biting and clawing beast on her face. Leaping clear of her flailing fists, Squeak scuttled into a dark corner, his job accomplished.
Slapping a wild thrust down with the flat of his left-hand dirk, Rolf stabbed the man in the belly with his right-hand blade and twisted as he withdrew, ripping the wound even wider. Dayyan thundered up the stairs behind him as Duna and Jothan killed the clerks and Kroh charged up the stairs leading to the office area.
When the shouting exploded overhead Henri calmly killed the guard with a brilliant beam of light and then caused a blinding flash of light similar to what the eggs created, dazzling the staff officer and the male clerk. The female faced the wrong way for the flash’s effect and came on at a dead run once she had turned, a dagger in hand; Henri cut her down with a second beam of light, sweating from the exertion of his spell-casting. The unlocking-spells hadn’t been too draining, but there had been enough to weaken his powers; without the staff he would have been looking to cold steel at this point. The rest of the raiders were charging around to the left to support whatever Elonia had been up to, but he didn’t mind; the odds facing him were dwindling away to nothing.
The lock gave on the first impact, having been designed for privacy, not security, and Elonia staggered into the room, seeing Arthol Mane leaping to his feet from behind a desk, scattering papers as he ripped a sword free. She caught her balance and closed the distance as he rounded the desk, pulling a knife from his boot with his left hand.
“You people are persistent, I’ll give you that,” the Markan-Hern observed, easing a step backwards. Elonia feinted and tried to trap his sword-blade but the Hand priest parried neatly and slashed at her leg, causing her to skip back a pace. Behind her screams and shouting indicated that someone had followed her into the loft and was keeping the operatives there busy.
The Seeress led with her left, only to have it blocked by Mane’s sword blade, and was forced to parry with her right. Seeing his opening, Arthol drove his knife’s point into her stomach, only to have the weapon deflected as if the Badger was wearing a shirt of mail. Taking advantage of his surprise, Elonia carved a bloody furrow across his left forearm, causing him to drop the knife.
The other office door exploded inward and Kroh thundered into the room, hurling his axe without breaking stride. Behind her a man shrieked in agony as the axe ripped itself free of flesh and bone and flipped through the air to its wielder’s tattooed hands.
Elonia kicked the knife into a corner and closed, shifting towards Mane’s left to force him away from a weapons rack. “It doesn’t look as if you’ll be getting any help,” she observed as Kroh planted himself in front of the doorway leading to the sleeping area. “Care to negotiate?”
Arthol backed up a careful step, keeping his sword’s hilt near his hip, the weapon’s blade angled slightly inward, the point just below the level of his eyes. He watched the odd blades the woman had strapped to her arms, her hands curled into loose fists; in the periphery of his field of vision he could see the Dwarf killing another of his staff officers, while the sounds of fighting further in the sleeping area suggested that things were going poorly for his people. He had pulled an alarm-wire that rang a bell in an adjoining building, alerting a dozen Hand associates who even now would be responding, heavily armed and in full armor. “I must confess, I find myself a bit surprised at how well you’ve infiltrated my facility.” He watched her blades, expecting an attack, stalling. “However did you get so far in without raising the alarm?”
“Your escape tunnel; we had a Dwarf examine the stonework of the surrounding cellars, figuring you would stay true to type.”
“Ah, clever, the one point of entry we were not watching. But what led you here?”
“A girl, sixteen or seventeen, looked like Lady Eithne, remember? You were amusing yourself by breaking her spirit over time.”
He frowned. “She was dead before you took the building, Tryza killed her.”
“Oh, yes, she was dead, but she had tiny braids of hair hidden in her cell, braids she had soaked with your bodily fluids. She hid them in a crack in the wall she marked with your name.”
“I...see,” he muttered, seeing it indeed. Bound together by his entertainment, and the girl herself dead, such a braid would act as a magnet in the hands of a skilled Seer. “The little bitch.”
“Some people have no gratitude.” He risked a glance at her face, and realized that the woman wasn't Human; some sort of Threll blood-mixture, he guessed.
“The Duchy will pay ten thousand ducats for my life,” he observed, concentrating on the job at hand. “I’ll go thirty for my release, no hard feelings.”
“I doubt you’ve thirty here in the building.”
“Not at all, after last time I moved my enchanted gear and ready cash to a separate location, but I can get it to you without much problem.”
“I’m sure you could. The problem is, we hope to win this siege, and your being dead or captured would further that goal.”
“I can arrange safe passage out of the city easily enough; in Arturia or the Empire the outcome of the siege would be of no import to you.”
The sound of running feet thundered up the stairs and a second later a wiry dark-headed man wearing Badger insignia and carrying a bloody basket-hilted sword and a buckler burst into the room. After taking in the situation, the newcomer moved in on Mane’s left, forcing him to put his back to the wall.
“Well, well, Arthol Mane, we meet again. Why aren’t we killing him just yet?”
“He’s stalling, I suppose he’s got help on the way,” the woman with the strange blades shrugged, watching the Markan’s sword.
“He did, in fact, but they ran into Gold Platoon,” the man, who had the look of a sailor about him, shrugged good naturedly. “Thirty to twelve, not so good odds, eh?”
“I know your face, but I’m having trouble placing you,” Arthol kept his face and voice calm, even as the sounds of the fighting in the sleeping area tapered off. There were around a dozen in there, and he had seen two die facing the Dwarf; ten unarmored, surprised staffers wouldn’t have presented much trouble to armored mercenaries.
“The last time you saw me I was wearin’ a leash and interpreting for the Hobrec,” the man gestured with his sword. “Funny how things turn out.”
“You must have been taken with Blackthorn, then.”
“Freed, not taken, and got a job out of it, but yeah, that was the time, when the Badgers fried a ship’s crew of Hobs, sure enough. Now, how about puttin’ down the blade like a good chap?”
“Not just yet.” He glanced at the woman. “Forty thousand.”
“I’m tempted to try a double-cross, but you’re too slippery an eel, I’m afraid. But for the girl we would never have found you again.”
“Such is luck.” Arthol forced himself to be calm as the Dwarf stepped back into the office, liberally splattered with blood. So his relief force was gone, along with most or all the headquarters staff; a second’s review showed that he had no real options left. He flexed the fingers of his wounded arm, sucking in a breath at the pain, but determining that he still had enough range of movement to d
o what he must. In a single smooth motion he reached up, grasped the collar of his plain, worn tunic, and thrust it between his teeth, all without taking his eyes off his opponents. Biting down hard, he felt one tooth chip as the glass cylinder broke and the taste of bitter almond joined that of sweaty wool.
Elonia and Jothan watched as the man collapsed, gagging and shuddering for a few seconds before lying still. “Poison, taken so he couldn’t be interrogated,” Elonia observed, kneeling down to nudge the man’s eye. “A professional to the bitter end.” There was a trace of grudging respect in her voice.
“A professional bastard.” Jothan thrust the point of his blade into Arthol’s side and twisted. “Yep, he’s good and dead. Henri took a couple alive below decks. I’ll go give him a hand watching ‘em.”
Kroh came over and looked at the body. “That’s the one?”
“That’s him, the Hand’s station commander, Arthol Mane,” Elonia nodded tiredly.
“Good riddance, then.” The Waybrother stomped off to attend to other details, leaving the Seeress sitting on the floor by the corpse.
Unstrapping her manoples, she wiped the left blade clean on Arthol’s tunic and sheathed the weapons. Eyeing the vacant, staring eyes, she shook her head slightly. “Two-stage poison and Pargaie training,” she told the dead man in a tired voice. “That’s what brought you down, specialized goods and a professional where you least expected one. Things like that can sneak up on you.” She closed her eyes and for a moment she was naked and bound to a bed-frame, the slats beneath her slick with her sweat, preparing to bite her own tongue in half. Opening her eyes, she climbed to her feet, a little unsteady in her movements.