A Meeting At Corvallis

by S. M. Stirling

The narrow confines of the stairwell trapped the man above her for an instant. In that instant she struck, hammering a knuckle into the inside of his thigh where it would paralyze the muscle. The leg buckled under him. Tiphaine slapped both her hands down on the wood of the stair as he fell and struck out behind her with both feet, a mule-kick at the shadowy figure behind her at the bottom of the stairs, lashing out with all the strength of her long, hard-muscled legs.

  Thump.

  Surprise almost slowed her as the half-seen opponent managed to get forearms up for a cross-block, riding the bone-shattering force of the blow backward, falling to the asphalt floor of the warehouse.

  Fast, that one. Be careful!

  Tiphaine let her feet fall back just in time for the man she'd leg-punched to topple back on top of her. The weight drove an ufffff! from between her teeth, but she made her arms and legs springs to push back at him, tossing him headforemost with his spine to the stairs. With a strangled yell he went hurtling down the stairs behind her, even as she turned and crouched and leapt again; he landed hard, and yelled again, this time in pain.

  The ground floor of the warehouse gave her space to move. The man was tangled up with the one she'd kicked. A corner of her mind registered moon-pale hair: Astrid Larsson. The door was temptingly open …

  Instead she turned and ran down an alleyway between towering piles of full, sixty-pound sacks of oats, the layout flashing through her mind as she moved. A deep bass voice swore outside the doorway, and the floor thudded as a man came through; he'd been waiting outside. John Hordle. Every bit as big as she remembered him but astonishingly quick, right on her heels. If those hands closed on her, she was doomed. It would be like trying to fight a grizzly.

  No choice.

  She sprang again, landed halfway up a fourteen-foot stack of bagged grain and scrambled to the top like a squirrel running up a tree. Across the top of it, slippery burlap moving beneath the soft gripping soles of her boots. The whole stack thudded and shivered under her as Hordle's massive weight slammed into it without slowing, then started to topple towards the wall in an avalanche that could shatter bones and kill. Desperate, Tiphaine let that fling her towards the window there, launching herself out with her arms crossed before her face.

  Crash.

  Glass shattered, and the thin laths broke and twisted. Tiphaine's belly drew up of itself—she had a fifty-fifty chance of carving her own guts out and spilling them on the ground, with a crazy stunt like this. At least she wouldn't have to try and explain to Lady Sandra how she'd missed four people lying in wait—

  Then she was rolling on the asphalt in the cold darkness; only superficial cuts. They stung, but no tendons were severed, no muscle deeply gashed. Rolling, up on her feet again, and another figure was coming around the corner of the warehouse, clearing a stack of boxes with a raking stride and landing smoothly, beautifully fluent. A woman, as tall as she, black hair—Eilir Mackenzie. The others would be seconds behind her.

  Tiphaine turned and leapt again, her foot hitting the top of a wheelbarrow leaned against the cinderblock outer wall of the Hatfield property and giving her a brace for another scrabbling jump. The top of the wall had a coil of barbed wire on it, bad but better than spikes or broken glass. She grabbed, heedless of the sharp iron punching into her palms, wrenched, pulled, flung her body up sideways and rolled across it, pulling with desperate strength as cloth and skin tore.

  Whump. The sidewalk outside struck her, nearly knocking out her wind. That wouldn't do.

  She was up and running down the street, pulling the rope and grapnel slung over her shoulder loose. As she did she filled her lungs and screamed:

  "Help! Police! Murder! Help!" and for good measure added a scream pure and simple, a shriek of fear and pain. Summoning one wasn't all that difficult.

  There weren't many houses in this neighborhood, but there were some, and night-watchmen as well. Lights flared, and doors opened, spilling yellow flame-light onto the pavement. A whistle sounded sharply not far away, and a clatter of hooves. The grapnel buzzed over her head and flew out, and the thin, strong rope snaked behind it. The tines came down on the peak of a roof, and she hit the side of the building running, swarming up the knotted rope with the strength of her arms alone and fending off with her feet; for a heart-stopping instant she thought the blood on her palms had made them too slick, but the chamois leather gave her enough traction.

  No time to stop on the roof, though her lungs burned and the cold air was like some hot, thin gas rasping her lungs. She snatched up the rope behind her as she ran, heedless of the risk of tripping, gathered it into a rough bundle and jerked the grapnel free as she passed. An alleyway beyond, another roof past it she pumped arms and legs to gather momentum, leapt outward—

  Behind her a great bass voice shouted: "What a sodding balls-up!"

  Corvallis, Oregon

  January 12th, 2008/Change Year 9

  Michael Havel stirred the body with a boot, carefully avoiding the tacky red-brown trickle of blood from the death-wound and the corpse's mouth and nose, still congealing in the cold air of a winter dawn. He was thankful there weren't any flies; a few tiny footprints indicated that the rats had been nosing around, though they hadn't had peace enough to settle in for a snack.

  "Three guesses as to the cause of death," he said dryly, touching a toe to the staghorn hilt of the knife whose blade had been driven up under the ribs.

  "Gee, that's a toughie," Signe said, her tone as pawky as his.

  We've been married going on ten years and we're starting to think alike, Havel thought. Apparently that old saying is true.

  Signe wrinkled her nose at the smell, but stooped over the tumbled corpse, which lay in a tangle of limbs and the collapsed cot. The others were out in the open space that made up most of the upper story of the warehouse, apart from Bill Hatfield, who was apparently still reaming out his unfortunate guards down below, near where they'd been found. In between times, he yelled at the police, who were shouting back. The gray light was gradually swelling, as the sun rose behind the clouds.

  And am I glad I'm not those guards! the lord of the Bearkillers thought. Assuming it wasn't what it looked like, they're still never going to live it down.

  "Look," his wife said, and pulled back the padded gambeson the dead man wore—they made passable winter coats—and the shirt beneath. "Someone broke his collarbone before they killed him. I thought the way his arm was lying was a bit strange."

  Havel grunted and leaned over, his hands on his knees. There was a little blood where the skin had been broken, and the bone gave under his probing fingertip. Someone had done exactly that—good sharp fracture, but not enough damage to have been done by a blade. At a guess, something metal and with an edge, but a blunt one.

  "Whoever it was did it quick," Signe went on. "One thrust and they left the knife in to cork him."

  Havel nodded agreement. Killing with a knife was messy unless carefully managed; but then, anyone who'd butchered pigs or sheep knew that.

  "Get Aaron—" he began, when someone cleared his throat behind him. "Oh, hi, Aaron. We need your expertise here."

  "My expertise as a theatre critic?" Aaron Rothman said.

  Havel straightened and courteously stepped aside as the physician limped into the room; he had a pair of rubber gloves still on, and they went rather oddly with the rumpled elegance of his jacket and turtleneck and trench coat. Wherever he'd slept, the slim Jewish doctor hadn't been at the Bearkiller consulate houses last night, and the circles under his eyes beneath the glasses suggested he'd been burning the candle at both ends. He was all professionalism now, his intelligent brown eyes narrowed in a pleasantly ugly fortysomething face shadowed with heavy morning stubble.

  "Theatre critic?" Havel asked.

  "Well, that was an inspired little piece of bitchery with the guards, but it was all put on, you know," Rothman said, a little New York still detectable in his voice though he'd been living in Lewiston, Idaho, at the time of the Chan
ge.

  At their enquiring expressions he went on: "Whoever did it should have just left them with the bottles; a murderous drunken frenzy followed by swinish collapse. Making it look as if they'd been doing the nasty as well was a bit much. And Vat 69—I ask you! Catty, very catty."

  "You're sure?" Signe said, her glance keen. "They were supposedly drunk."

  "O delightfully strong-jawed Amazonian queen of Castle Rustic, mother of my honorary nieces and nephew … radar may not work anymore, but my gay-dar is, I assure you, fully functional. You could draw the shortest line between any two points with either Harry or Dave. Pity. Dave's a bit dishy, in a rough-trade Tom of Finland sort of way."

  He struck a pose, and Havel snorted laughter. Aaron wasn't only gay, but outrageously swish—two characteristics which Havel had learned in the Corps didn't necessarily go together. He suspected the doctor enjoyed shocking the rather insular rural community he'd ended up in, as well.

  "Gosh, you're making me feel so butch again, Aaron," Signe said.

  "Oh, just let me do the makeover! A nice James Dean cut for the hair, the right plaid shirt, that brutally handsome little scar on your nose … OK, OK, let's get back to business."

  He stooped over the body, manipulated wrist and limbs, rubbed a little of the blood between rubber-clad finger and thumb to test how much it had thickened, then moved clothing aside to check on the lividity. There was an impersonal gentleness in the way he moved the corpse.

  "Someone crushed his foot, too," he said. "That would be quite, quite agonizing. Not as bad as having it cut off and eaten in front of your eyes"—he tapped his own artificial foot against the floor, encased in a trim Oxford loafer with a tassel—"but sufficiently painful. And there was a blow to the larynx; that would have kept him quiet."

  Havel grunted again, and looked at the door. "He came over to the door. Someone unlocked and opened it, and then maybe he started out. Whoever was outside stamp-kicked him on the instep, broke his collarbone, hit him in the throat and pushed him in. Jumped on him as he tried to get away and killed him with a single thrust to the heart."

  "Which means the late unlamented probably knew whoever it was and let them get close, not expecting to be attacked," Signe said, with a low whistle. "Slick!"

  "Yeah," Havel said. "Real pro job. Time of death?" he went on to Rothman.

  "Sometime within the last few hours. And the esteemed Mr. Hatfield checked on them before he went to bed, so that narrows it down. The police doctor was right about that at least."

  "Right about that at least?" Havel asked.

  Rothman nodded, taking off the rubber gloves with slow care—they were hard to replace, and had to be reused after a spell in an autoclave.

  "She thought they really had passed out after three bottles of eighty-proof local 'whiskey,' pseudo, so-called. I can't absolutely prove it but I'm pretty certain one was slugged behind the ear with something heavy but malleable, and the other was chloroformed. Then they were tranked, at a guess with a cocktail including scopolamine. My colleague is competent but she's young, trained here post-Change—not as familiar with the concept of exotic drugs as a big-city boy like moi. Whatever it is, it mimics an alcohol-induced stupor and the aftereffects quite convincingly, including some retrograde amnesia. Scopolamine wipes your short-term memory, so you don't recall what happened before you went bye-bye. Anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or so is blanked."

  "But if they don't have anything like that here in Corvallis, where—" Havel began.

  Signe and Rothman were both staring at him, a slight look of exasperation in their eyes. "Portland," he said.

  Rothman nodded. "I've talked with doctors who work there, a few times. They have quite a pharmacopoeia. Less new production than here in Corvallis, but the Lord Protector's had a scavenging operation of quite remarkable scope going since the first Change Year, stockpiling everything his men could find. No dust from a saint's tomb for him when he's feeling a bit peaked, I assure you."

  "Sir Jason here would have made the Association look bad if he talked when the Rangers showed him off," Havel said thoughtfully.

  "Astrid says he wasn't going to talk, which cut his value. But having him dead will make the Dunedain and Bill Hatfield look very bad," Signe said. "Those rumors that we're all fanatics, barbarians and nutcases? What better proof than our dragging a man in and him ending up knifed and dead here in law-abiding Corvallis?"

  "We're supposed to have killed him?" Havel asked. "Or at least, Astrid and Eilir are supposed to have brought him into town, and then killed him? Or the Bobbsey Twins out there did it?"

  "Honey, betcha the rumors are spreading right now. Rumors don't have to be credible, just juicy."

  Havel looked at the doctor, who threw up his hands in a theatrical shrug. "No, I can't prove what we all know to be true. Not enough to satisfy a court."

  "Not a court here in Corvallis," Havel said grimly.

  "Oh, this is bad," Juniper Mackenzie said sorrowfully, as a stretcher team brought the body down the stairs. "This is very bad indeed."

  The policeman turned on Hatfield. "Bill, what the hell were you thinking, keeping someone locked up on your lonesome, in the first place? You may have noticed we don't have slavery in this town, unlike some people I could name, and kidnapping's still a crime last time I looked."

  Detective Simon Terwen was a man in his early thirties with rather shaggy brown hair and a gold wedding band on his left hand, in civilian clothes, denim jacket and pants and tire-soled leather boots, unremarkable except for the badge on one breast pocket and the shortsword, handcuffs and nightstick at his belt. The constables behind him were in blue uniforms with the same equipment, except that one—the tall man standing next to the close-coupled stocky woman—had a catchpole as well, a shaft with a Y-shaped, spring-loaded fork at the end. All three of them looked disturbed; violent crime within the city wall was rare, with no more than one or two murders annually since the chaos of the first Change Year. Most of the small police force's time was taken up with traffic control, enforcing the health and safety bylaws, and settling the odd family dispute.

  "Lady Astrid, Lady Eilir, Mister Hordle, you all say a figure in black came out of the room where the deceased was held, eluded you and ran away? After calling for the police."

  "That's right," Astrid said stolidly. "She was very fast."

  "She?" Terwen asked.

  Alleyne nodded stiffly, his right hand kneading his neck; there were fresh bruises on his face as well. "From the sound of her voice when she called for the police—which meant that we couldn't chase her, since we were too busy explaining things to your people, Detective."

  "Things were completely shambolic," Hordle said. "Like chasing a bloody rubber ball, it was." He turned to Eilir, who spoke to him in Sign, then turned back. "Eilir says she was about her size and build, but that she couldn't get close enough to see anything else."

  "Well, there is blood on the ground outside the window," Terwen said. "And on the barbed wire, and on the rooftop across the alley. That does tend to corroborate your story … which doesn't mean it's very convincing. I still have a dead body with a knife in it, and it's your employee's knife, Mr. Hatfield, and you were imprisoning the victim without legal authority. You may have noticed judges are getting more sensitive about stuff like that this last little while, Bill."

  "That bastard was from the Protectorate, not a Corvallan citizen," Hatfield said stolidly.

  "Well, why were you dragging him around?" Terwen asked, turning on the Dunedain leaders.

  "He led a bandit attack on our territory," Astrid said, making a dismissive gesture. "We brought him here to explain that to your Faculty Senate, with the rest of the evidence."

  "Evidence?"

  "There," she said, pointing.

  One of the younger Dunedain helpfully stepped over to a leather trunk stacked against the wall, one of a set designed to go on either side of a pack-saddle, and flipped it open. A few of the spectators stepped back at the
spoiled-meat smell, not overwhelming in the cold weather, but fairly strong. The glassy stares of the dead bandits stared out into the room, bloated, smiling with the rictus that draws back the drying lips.

  "Oh, Astrid, Eilir," Juniper murmured under her breath. "You girls just cannot resist a dramatic gesture, can you?"

  She put her hand in Nigel Loring's. Even then, and despite what must be a chorus of devils beating out a tune on the inside of his skull, Alleyne Loring noticed and smiled.

  "Thirty-two dead bandits, and we didn't lose one of our own," Astrid said proudly. "And this orcb from the Protectorate was leading them against us."

  Terwen sighed himself. "You know, Lady Astrid, I actually believe every word you've said. The problem is there's no proof of anything, including who those heads belonged to."

  Astrid looked at him, her silver-veined blue eyes puzzled. "But we wouldn't have killed them if they weren't bandits and evildoers," she pointed out.

  Eilir made a clicking sound with her tongue. Astrid looked over at her, and the other signed: There's that paper that the monk gave us.

  "Ah!" Astrid said. "I'd forgotten that … "

  It was in another box, a smaller steel one they used for money and documents. Terwen looked it over; the writing was a fine copperplate, but a little unsteady due to internal application of Brannigan's Special. He held it up to the gray winter daylight from outside, checking that it had the Abbey's watermark—Mount Angel made its own paper too, at least for official documents.

  "Well, this corroborates your story," he said. "Mind if I show this to the chief of police? Thanks. OK, you two"—he pointed a finger at Harry and Dave, sitting with numb expressions on overturned buckets—"don't try leaving town, or I will definitely bring charges and you go to the lockup pending trial. There'll have to be a judicial hearing, as it is."

  He turned to the Mackenzies and Bearkillers. "You folks know what I did before the Change?"

  "No," Mike Havel said. "You weren't a student, like everybody else in this town?"

  "Nah, I was a cop. Sometimes I think that's a disadvantage. I may … will need to talk to you all again. Please notify me if you're leaving town before this is settled."