The Oathbound

by Mercedes Lackey

  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‘enedsa.”

  “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 bloodstreaked, 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 trapped 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 troupe 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 packtrain 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 mage-robes 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 swords-man. 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 packtrains, 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 the swordswoman would have an identical scar and ring. These two had sworn Shin‘a’in blood-oath, the oath of she‘enedran; the strongest bond known to that notoruiously 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.

  Tarma held her blade up to catch the firelight and examined her work with a critical eye. Evidently satisfied, she drove it home in the scabbard slung across her back with a fluid, unthinking grace, then swung one leg back over the bench to face him as her partner did. Grumio found the unflinching chill of her eyes disconcertingly hard to meet for long.

  In an effort to find something else to look at, he found his gaze caught by the pendant she wore, a thin silver crescent surrounding a tiny amber flame. That gave him the last bit of information he needed to make eveything fall into place—although now he realized that her plain brown clothing should have tipped him off as well, since most Shin‘a’in favored wildly-colored garments heavy with bright embroideries. Tarma was a Sworn One, Kal‘enedral, pledged to the service of the Shin’a‘in Warrior, the Goddess of the New Moon and the South Wind. Only three things were of any import to her at all—her Goddess, her people, and her Clan (which, of course, would include her “sister” by blood-oath). The Sword Sworn were just as sexless and deadly as the weapons they wore.

  “So why come to us?” Tarma’s expression indicated she thought their time was being wasted. “What makes you think that we can solve your bandit problem?”

  “You—have a certain reputation,” he replied guardedly.

  A single bark of contemptuous laughter was Tarma’s only reply.

  “If you know our reputation, then you also know that we only take those assignments that—shall we say—interest us,” Kethry said, looking wid
e-eyed and innocent. “What is there about your problem that could possibly be of any interest to us?”

  Good—they were intrigued, at least a little. Now, for the sake of poor little Lena, was the time to hook them and bring them in. His eyes stung a little with tears he would not shed—not now—not in front of them. Not until she was avenged.

  “We have a custom, we small merchant houses. Our sons must remain with their fathers to learn the trade, and since there are seldom more than two or three houses in any town, there is little in the way of choice for them when it comes time for marriage. For that reason, we are given to exchanging daughters of the proper age with our trade allies in other towns, so that our young people can hopefully find mates to their liking.” His voice almost broke at the memory of watching Lena waving good-bye from the back of her little mare, but he regained control quickly. It was a poor merchant that could not school his emotions. “There were no less than a dozen sheltered, gently-reared maidens in the very first packtrain they took. One of them was my niece. My only heir, and all that was left of my brother’s family after the plague six years ago.” He could continue no further.

  Kethry’s breath hissed softly, and Tarma swal lowered an oath.

  “Your knowledge of what interests us is very accurate, merchant,” Tarma said after a long pause. “I congratulate you.”

  “You—you accept?” Discipline could not keep hope out of his voice.

  “I pray you are not expecting us to rescue your lost ones,” Kethry said as gently as she could. “Even supposing that the bandits were more interested in slaves to be sold than their own pleasure—which in my experience is not likely—there is very, very little chance that any of them still live. The sheltered, the gentle, well, they do not survive—shock —successfully.”

  “When we knew that the packtrain had been taken, we sent agents to comb the slave markets. They returned empty-handed,” he replied with as much stoicism as he could muster. “We will not ask the impossible of you; we knew when we sent for you there was no hope for them. No, we ask only that you wipe out this vipers’ den, to insure that this can never happen to us again—that you make such an example of them that no one dares try this again—and that you grant us revenge for what they have done to us!” There—that was his full hand. Would it be enough?