Redoubt

by Mercedes Lackey

  How had he gotten to a city from the mine in the first place? And where was this place that he knew was home, even though he couldn’t even remember what it was?

  Little by little, fragments of memories came back. He clung to them fiercely.

  That bittersweet taste in the soup and the water . . . that had to be a drug. And the smoke—that must have been how they’d gotten the drug into him the first time, after they hit him in the head. He was pretty sure he’d been hit in the head; it felt as if someone had nearly cracked his skull open. He’d been burning hot for what seemed like forever but had probably only been days, but now he was cold. What did that mean? Had he been dreaming himself in the mine for weeks? Was it winter now? Or had he been burning with fever, and now the fever had broken?

  Maybe all it meant was that the weather had changed . . . the weather had been due to change to colder. Everyone in Haven had been complaining that it hadn’t. He remembered that, too, even though he couldn’t remember who the everyone was.

  He couldn’t understand a word the two men were saying, and that sent him into a panic. Had he lost his ability to understand speech?

  Had he had that same thought before?

  Was he going insane?

  He huddled in on himself more, and despite his effort to keep quiet, his teeth started to chatter.

  The wagon stopped.

  Oh, no . . .

  Of all things, he wanted to hang onto this clarity. He didn’t want them to drug him again! He squeezed his eyes shut, held as still as he could, breathing evenly as if he were still unconscious, but allowed his teeth to chatter.

  This time he heard two sets of footsteps coming around to the back of the wagon, two men grunted as they pulled themselves up into the rear, and the wagon moved under their weight.

  And that was when he suddenly realized, with a touch of hysteria, that he desperately needed to urinate.

  He felt boxes and bales being moved around him, and kept still and limp. But he was not expecting it when he felt rough hands hauling him upright.

  The men gabbled at each other in a grumbling sort of way as he debated—should he stay limp? Or should he act like . . . like a sleepwalker?

  He had about a fifty percent chance of guessing wrong; he guessed, and acted like a sleepwalker . . . half-cooperating as they manhandled him down out of the wagon. He almost wept when he realized this was what they were expecting.

  He cracked his eyelids slightly. Sleepwalkers sometimes opened their eyes, so he didn’t think it would matter, and it would keep him from hurting himself if he could see where he was going.

  Wherever he was, it looked nothing like the land around the mine. It did look like early fall. He could smell the leaves turning, and they were going colors, here and there. The trees were more sparse than they were around the mine, the ground seemed harder, barer. It was definitely hillier. He thought it was very early morning, the sunlight had that thin quality to it.

  The men walked him over to a clump of bushes and . . .

  It took all of his control to keep from reacting as one of them, with a grunt of disgust, pulled his trews down and took out his . . .

  But the desperate need took over, and he let loose, even though it was someone else doing the directing and all. His knees nearly gave with relief when the man pulled his trews back up, roughly, making it crystal clear that he would rather have been doing anything else.

  That’s why they’re feeding me soup. So they don’t have to worry about getting me to squat.

  He let them half carry him back to the wagon, arrange him in a curl, but this time on his other side. His teeth were still chattering; the men didn’t seem cold, but his clothing wasn’t very heavy, and it was clammy and damp with sweat. Their clothing was a lot heavier than his, and it looked a little odd to him, something like a padded leather jacket over baggy trews wrapped at the ankles with thin strips of more leather.

  They hauled him up, dropped him into what was evidently “his” spot, and curled him on his side. He was almost grateful when one of them tossed a heavy blanket that smelled of horse over him before they piled the bales and boxes around him and tossed a canvas over the top of it all.

  Now he opened his eyes completely. He still couldn’t move, much, so he concentrated on trying to remember, instead.

  My name is Mags. That was easy, he already knew that.

  The last thing I remember is being ambushed on a rooftop, in a city called Haven.

  Why was he on the rooftop in the first place?

  There was a man . . . Nikolas. He could see Nikolas in his head—nondescript, unmemorable, and yet somehow he knew that this “Nikolas” was a very important man. He was doing work for Nikolas. Work that . . . was also important.

  He got another flash of memory, of a shop of some sort. A shop that sold. . . .

  No, a shop that mostly bought.

  Pawnshop.

  His mind supplied the name.

  All right, he was there at that shop, in Haven . . . why? Doing work, but—what kind? And the clothing he was wearing now . . . it was all wrong. It felt wrong. He only wore this to do that work for Nikolas. It wasn’t his usual clothing.

  All right then, what was his usual clothing? He tried to picture it, imagined himself getting dressed in the dark, and when he came out into the light he would be wearing—

  Trainee Grays!

  And with those two words, everything he had not been able to remember, everything he was, came flooding back.

  He knew now that his dream of a devil was just made up out of fear and old nightmares. What the “devil” really was, in that conversation that he had recalled correctly, the thing that had been frightening the life out of the Pieters boys, hadn’t been a bad thing at all. It had been Dallen, a Companion, and they had been frightened, not because Dallen was evil, but because the coming of a Companion meant that their entire mining operation, based as it was on slavery, cruelty, exploitation, and murder, was going to be exposed. They had known that there was no way that the Companion had come for one of them. Every single one of them was complicit in how the mine-kiddies were mistreated and abused, and no Companion would come for someone who would sit back and allow that sort of thing to happen. That meant that Dallen had to be there for one of the mine-kiddies . . . and eventually, no matter what threats held him silent before, as soon as the kid knew he was safe, the truth would come out. Or else, if he remained silent and terrified, they would work a Truth Spell on him, or have a Healer look into his mind and find out.

  When that happened—as, indeed, it had, when the truth had come out of Mags—they would be in more trouble than they could possibly imagine.

  No wonder they had been petrified. No wonder they had tried to shoot Dallen . . .

  Not that they’d ever had any chance of actually hurting the Companion. All things considered, it was unlikely that any of the boys would have been able to hit a barn, much less a Companion as agile and clever as Dallen. None of them were marksmen, though they liked to think that they were. They were never given the leisure to practice, for one thing. Cole Pieters made sure his boys were no good with anything that might be used as a weapon, other than the crudest implements of club and ax. The mine-kiddies were better marksmen with rocks than the Pieters boys were with any weapon.

  But despite their father’s orders, probably they hadn’t been shooting to hurt—because the penalty for harming a Companion was life in penal servitude, and not even their father’s threats would convince them to risk that—but to drive Dallen away. A stupid idea, since a Companion on Search couldn’t be driven away from his Chosen with a drakken, but the Pieters boys were all very stupid. Sly, but stupid.

  And then, when Herald Jakyr had turned up, summoned by Dallen’s frantic demands to his Companion, it was too late. N
ot even Cole Pieters would dare harm a Herald. Jakyr—that was probably where his mind had gotten the name Jak from. He’d never known a “Jak” in the mine that was near to his own age, near enough to have haunted him.

  Oh, it all came back to him now.

  And so did the memories connected with that rooftop. Or at least he thought he knew what had happened, because whatever had occurred, it had been very fast indeed, and he didn’t have any actual memory of when he’d been taken down, much less what had done it.

  But he remembered going up on the roof, as always. He’d been minding the shop alone. Dallen was at the inn. Everything had been completely normal, other than the fact that the sky was overcast and there was fog coming up off the river. He’d felt that “watching” sensation, just like always. He had paused to take his bearings before a lightning run across the rooftops to get away from it as quickly as he could, because it was still giving him the crawlies to feel those unseen eyes on him.

  And then, out of nowhere, he felt . . . something. Whether it was that the watcher had alerted these two men, or that the watcher had, itself, somehow moved to strike him unconscious, he didn’t know. There had just been that flash of knowledge, the certainty that something changed, and then nothing.

  Dallen! Dallen must be frantic by now!

  He dropped all his shields—because Dallen must be pretty far away at this point, and he was going to need all the reach he could get—

  That is, he tried to drop all his shields. But it was as if he didn’t have shields to drop. Or the shields weren’t his.

  Or his Mindspeech had somehow been cut away.

  It felt like a blow to the gut. It left him gasping, literally gasping, as if someone had ripped out his innards, and he was in too much shock to feel pain. And he must have made enough sound that the men at the front of the wagon heard him. The wagon stopped again, and as Mags felt rising panic, he heard the footsteps coming around, felt the man get into the wagon, felt the hand in his hair.

  Then it was as he remembered from his nightmares, and the waterskin was forced into his mouth, and all he could manage to do was keep his eyes shut and to drink as little as possible. He was afraid to let too much of the liquid dribble out of his mouth. It was broad daylight, and his captors would see and force more down his throat. Obviously they wanted him for something, but without Mindspeech, he hadn’t a clue as to what that would be. Or could be.

  He only knew for sure that he had to stay lucid, somehow. Had to keep his awareness of who and what he was.

  The man finally let him back down into his cavity, and wave after wave of vertigo swept over him, until finally feverish delirium took him.

  But now, he knew what that was. And he clung on tightly to his knowledge of himself. My name is Mags. I’m a Herald Trainee. My Companion is Dallen . . .

  He wouldn’t think about what not having Mindspeech would mean. He did know, at least, that there were Heralds with very little, very weak Gifts. It was the Companion that made the Herald, and surely he could keep right on doing what Nikolas was training him for even if his Mindspeech was gone forever. He’d just have to be cleverer than before.

  And all right, even if he couldn’t do that, the main job of a Herald was to see that the Kingdom’s laws were known and obeyed, and you didn’t need a Gift to do that. All you needed, when it came right down to it, was for people to think you had a Gift. He could do that.

  In his feverish state he saw himself tricking people with some of the sharpster moves he had been learning from Nikolas and some of Nikolas’ slightly disreputable friends. “Cold reading,” was what one of the actors had called it, a fellow who had eked out his small pay from small parts by telling fortunes. If you threw enough hints out, people would tell you with their reactions if you were close to the truth, and you could soon have them convinced you could read their minds or were talking to spirits or could see the future. He claimed you didn’t actually need the Truth Spell if you were good enough at cold reading. He could do cold reading. He’d been doing some of it on the shop customers. He could imagine himself somewhere on Circuit, in the field, being persuasive, coaxing, being . . .

  He found that he was surrounded by a small group of people in rustic garments. They were angry, very angry . . .

  This is a drug dream. Now he knew what that other voice inside him was. It was the part of him that still hung on to reality. Even if this felt, looked, sounded, even smelled like reality.

  “. . . stole it, I tell ye!” growled one old man, who seemed to be the leader of one side. “Stole it right out o’ my pasture, she did!”

  They were all crowded into what looked like the common room of a tavern. Dark, smoky wooden walls. Smells of food and beer. He was sitting at a table, the others clustered around him.

  The be-aproned woman who led the opposite group snarled at him. “I no more stole it than I’m the Queen of Valdemar! He let it stray, it ate half my cabbages, and I’m keeping it in payment for my loss!”

  She turned to the man next to her, as Mags concentrated on trying to catch all the tells Sieran had shown him. “Haber! You be my witness! Tell the Herald!”

  The man turned to Mags, a hangdog expression on his face. “Gabble gabble,” he said, and waved his hands apologetically. “Gabble, gabble gabble gabble. Gabble.”

  The angry man stamped his foot and snarled. “Gabble!” he spat.

  It’s them . . . Mags managed to think through the fog and the confusion, and through the intensely real feeling that all this had. It’s them. The ones driving the wagon. They’re talking.

  He couldn’t quite break free of the hallucination, but part of him, at least, now knew it was a fever dream and nothing real. So when it all started to go wrong, and the crowd turned on him, he made it all stop, made it all go back to the beginning. He’d learned how to do that with his nightmares, thanks to the Healers. He still had the nightmares, but at least now he could control them.

  “. . . stole it, I tell ye!” growled the old man, who was complaining to Mags about a disputed goat. “Stole it right out o’ my pasture, she did!”

  He paid more attention to the old man this time, a wizened old goat in linen shirt and breeches and a leather apron. The old man was afraid, underneath all that bluster he was afraid of the woman. In fact, everyone was at least a little afraid of the woman. Why were they afraid?

  He interrupted her when she began her response. “You’re lying,” he said flatly, and that was when her face stretched out and grew a set of terrible jaws, bat-wings burst out of the back of her shirt, and she reached for him with awful claws.

  But again, he managed to remember, this is drugs. This is a fever dream. He managed to wrest control away, and send it all back to the beginning again.

  “. . . stole it, I tell ye!” growled the old man, whose eyes were bleak and blank. “Stole it right out o’ my pasture, she did!” Mags knew what was in his mind without needing Mindspeech. He didn’t expect to win, but he wasn’t going to give up without a fight. He couldn’t afford to. He was going to starve without that goat.

  But Mags was ready this time, and the moment the woman began to change, the knife was in his hand one moment and in her throat the next, and she fell over, black blood pouring out of her throat, face caught halfway between woman and monster, as all of her neighbors stared.

  Then Mags wasn’t looking down at a dead woman. He was looking up at a live one. She smiled at him, and he felt transfixed with utter delight, his entire being suffused with a golden glow of happiness and well being. “Gabble gabble gooo,” she crooned at him. “Gabble Meric good boy gabble.” She picked him up, and he giggled giddily. She was half his world, and he adored her so much, the source of food and warmth and comfort! “Gabble goo goo goo,” she whispered in his ear as she cuddled him against her breast. Her breast! The source of all things wond
erful!

  But he wasn’t hungry right now, so he stuck his thumb in his mouth and sucked on that until she pulled it out and gave him his bappy to suck instead. He loved his bappy, a cool stone with a hole in it, just exactly the right size to pop in his mouth and ease his gums when they hurt. It sometimes annoyed him that he couldn’t swallow it, it was so smooth and nice, but it was fastened quite thoroughly to a big piece of cloth that prevented him from doing so. He nestled against the Breast, the wonderful, bountiful Breast, and sucked his bappy, and fell asleep, listening to Her whisper to him. “Gabble gabble Meric gabble . . .”

  He slept then, both in the drugged dream and probably in reality, because when he next was aware of anything at all, it was that the wagon was swaying quite a lot, it was dark, too dark to see, and he was cramping again. But he clamped his mouth shut on his moans. He didn’t want his captors to realize he was awake. Eventually, he knew, they would decide it was time to drug him, and then it would be back to the hallucinations again—

  Can I make them think I’m getting weaker, so the drug has more of a hold over me?

  He thought maybe he could. When they got him out to take care of his bladder, he could be a little rubber-kneed. There might be other things he could do. Now that he knew what was going on, maybe he could—

  The wagon stopped. He tried not to brace himself. Stay quiet, stay limp, he repeated to himself, over and over, just as in the mine he had repeated over and over to the ghosts to leave him alone.

  And that made him think of something else entirely. What if that watching thing was somehow with them now? How would he know? Without Mindspeech he couldn’t sense the thing! He felt panic churning in his gut, although enough of the drug held him still that muscles that should have been rigid with fear were just cramped and painful. It was just adding insult to injury that the drug that kept him paralyzed did nothing about the pain or the cramps. He was so caught in his tangle of fear and hurt that he didn’t even realize the men were in the wagon with him until they hauled him up and out.