by Kyra Halland
The thought eased her heart, and she finally fell asleep.
Chapter 3
IN THE MORNING, Silas and Lainie went down to the hotel’s bathhouse. To Silas’s disappointment, the tub was barely big enough for one, never mind two, but they still managed to give each other a thorough, and badly-needed, scrubbing.
Back up in their room, Silas opened Verl Bissom’s knapsack. He set aside Verl’s clothes to be cleaned and mended and then either altered to fit him or Lainie or else sold. In the Wildings, worldly goods were never let go to waste out of some misplaced sense of respect for the dead, who, after all, no longer needed them. There were also some packets of dried food, a welcome addition to their provisions. Down at the bottom of the knapsack, he found the expected Mage Council message box kit. Silas opened the round silver message box; it was empty. No clue there as to why Bissom was in the Bads or who might have killed him.
Silas had been keeping his mage senses open to detect any traps or other spells on the knapsack that he might have missed before, and they pricked at him now. He set the pack down carefully and took his hands off of it, then probed more deeply with his mage senses.
There was a spell on the pack, but it wasn’t anything dangerous; the pack had a hidden magical storage space in the bottom, similar to the one in his own knapsack. Taking care not to do any damage or trigger any traps, he worked the magical pocket open. Concealed inside was a second message box kit. The box was square and marked with the familiar engravings of the Hidden Council.
So, Verl Bissom had also been aligned with the Hidden Council. Somehow, Silas wasn’t surprised at this. As a safety measure, the identities of the Hidden Council’s members and allies were known only to a few in the leadership of the Council, but from Verl’s manner and attitude during the short time they had worked together, Silas had guessed that Verl held many of the same beliefs in natural rights and equality that he did.
Silas opened the Hidden Council message box; it was empty as well. Still, he sat holding the small silver box, studying it as though it might yet reveal its secrets. This discovery added a new and disturbing dimension to the mystery of Bissom’s death. Silas, and everyone else who allied themselves with the Hidden Council, knew that if the Mage Council ever found out about the Hidden Council and their work, they would all be declared traitors and placed under a sentence of death. Had the Hidden Council been discovered and the purge begun? If it had, Silas’s name would be on the list of those to be eliminated along with Bissom’s.
It could just be coincidence that a Hidden Council-allied mage hunter had been murdered, he told himself. Mage hunters tended to be an independent bunch, and, based on what he knew of the six or seven working hunters he had become acquainted with during his career, he would guess that at least half of them held opinions that would align them with the Hidden Council’s aims and ideals. Odds could be as much as half and half or even better that any given mage hunter would be allied with the Hidden Council; that didn’t mean that if he was killed it had anything to do with the Hidden Council. It was just as likely that Bissom had been killed by the rogue mage – or mages – that Horden wanted help with.
“Find anything?” Lainie asked, combing out her damp hair in long, rippling waves of light reddish-brown.
Silas tucked the square silver box back into the knapsack before she could see it. To cover his hesitation while he tried to think of an answer, he busied himself with sorting through Bissom’s possessions. He hadn’t yet told her about the Hidden Council except to say, in a general way, that there were other mages who shared his aim of protecting Plain folks. He trusted her, but he hadn’t wanted to burden her with the necessity of keeping the secret. As well, he didn’t want to give her anything more to worry about than she already had. Since his speculation that there could be a connection between Verl Bissom’s Hidden Council alliance and his death was just speculation, he decided to keep it to himself for now. “Just his clothes, some food, and his message box kit.”
“That’s all?”
“Yeah.” There had been no money, and no letters from home or other signs of family. Had the killer taken them, along with Bissom’s mage ring, as keepsakes or as proof of the kill? Though the Mage Council would probably inform Bissom’s family of his death – or would they, if they were the ones who had ordered it? – Silas, as a fellow hunter, felt an obligation to do so as well. But the contents of the knapsack told him nothing about who Bissom’s family was or where they were. All he had to go on was Bissom’s name and the fact that Bissom had Island blood. Silas didn’t know of any mixed Granadaian-Islander mage families bearing the Granadaian name Bissom, but there were a couple of Islander family names it could have been derived from. Assuming it bore any resemblance to his real name at all. Silas himself didn’t use his birth name; besides having cut all ties with his family years ago, using an Island name in the Wildings was a good way to find yourself dangling from a gibbet right quick.
Though, in the end, using an assumed name hadn’t saved Bissom.
Silas looked at Lainie again as she finished braiding her hair. He liked this whole situation less and less all the time, and he wished she hadn’t insisted on coming to the Bads with him. He should have forced her to stay behind and wait for him, but, gods help him, he didn’t want to force her to do anything against her will, no matter that it was for her own good. In large part, what lay between them was based on respect, and he didn’t want to ruin it by treating her in a way that she would see as disrespectful.
She wasn’t helpless, he tried to reassure himself. She was powerful, and basic magical attacks and defensive shields had been one of the first things he had taught her after they left the Bitterbush Valley. And she had a more mundane weapon to hand, as well.
“Let’s go get breakfast,” he said, “and then I want to see how well you can use that gun.”
* * *
WHILE OTHER ITEMS might be in short supply in Ripgap, ammunition was one thing there was plenty of at the Dusty Demon, which doubled as the town mercantile. The blond-braided barkeeper, who owned the saloon with his brother the cook, told Lainie and Silas he had bought a large supply some time ago when a gun and ammunition dealer had passed through Ripgap, but getting in fights was more work than most of the fellows in town wanted to bother with and few troublemakers happened by out this way, so he was having difficulty selling his stock. He agreed to sell them twenty boxes of fifty bullets, ten boxes each of the appropriate sizes for their guns, for the bargain price of twenty drinas a box.
Lainie bit her lip anxiously as she watched Silas count out four gildings, a substantial portion of their remaining funds. It didn’t seem like a bargain to her. She knew she needed training and practice, but it seemed a waste that all that money would end up as spent bullets in the dirt.
They went out into the desert past the edge of town, then Silas took six of his bullets and six of Lainie’s from the boxes. He slipped on his mage ring and murmured some words over the bullets while his mage ring and left hand glowed blue. “There,” he said when he was done. He put Lainie’s bullets into her hand. “Put a keeper charm on those.”
Lainie did what he said; keeper charms were easy, one of the first things he had taught her. “What did you do to them?”
“I turned them into reusable dummy bullets. A little spell of my own invention. We can fire them as many times as we want, and with the keeper charms they’ll always come back to us. So we can train without using up all our ammunition.”
“And the folks in town won’t think anything of it, because we bought so much,” Lainie added, impressed with his thinking. It was too bad the Plain settlers were so dead-set against magic and wizards; practice bullets and keeper charms were downright useful spells to have in the Wildings.
The rest of that day and all the next, Lainie worked on learning to draw more quickly and shoot faster and more accurately. They shot at empty food cans from the Demon and targets Silas constructed from bundles of twigs and scrub grass
and the pads of pricklepad cactuses. Lainie had first learned to handle a gun when she was six and her aim was already pretty good, but after hours of practice and Silas’s demanding instruction, she improved it to where she could shoot while turning or running and hit her target five times out of six. She also got to where she could draw and shoot almost as fast as Silas could, and with almost as much accuracy at speed.
Late in the afternoon of the second day, Lainie came in just a hair behind Silas in shooting a dozen cans, six for each of them, scattered among the rocks and scrub. “Pretty good, huh?” she said.
“Not bad,” Silas replied. “But not good enough, either.”
“I got all six of ’em in six shots and almost as fast as you.”
“You have to be faster than me.” His practice bullets reappeared in his hand, and Lainie called hers back, as well. “I don’t want you to suffer for it if I’m not fast enough.”
He sounded like he wasn’t just saying it to give her a hard time but like he was really worried about something. That sneaking sense Lainie had had ever since he went through Verl Bissom’s knapsack nudged at her again. “Is there something you aren’t telling me, Vendine?”
“Nothing that you don’t already know, darlin’.”
“Huh.” She didn’t believe him; that answer was just a way of dancing around the subject. Usually when she called him by his last name he knew she meant business. So if that didn’t shake any answers loose, he must have a damn good reason for not telling her. Which only made her want to know even more what it was he was hiding from her. It could be that he wasn’t even sure himself what it was, she thought. In that case, she could stand to give him a little more time to figure it out. “You’ll tell me if there’s something I need to know that I don’t, right?” she asked as they tucked the dummy bullets into the bullet loops on their gunbelts; quick reloading was something else they were working on.
He gave her a quick grin. “Of course. Load.”
They reloaded their guns. Silas clicked the chamber on his revolver shut while Lainie was still sliding the sixth practice bullet into place. “Damn!” she said. “I don’t think I’ll ever be as fast as you, never mind faster.”
“Keep trying.” He replaced the shot-up cans they were using as targets among the rocks and brush, then came back to her. “I think you’re capable of a lot more than you realize.”
* * *
BY THE NEXT day, their third full day in Ripgap, there still had been no sign of Garis Horden. A three-day delay wasn’t that long, Silas told himself; there were any number of things that could have delayed Horden by three or four days, especially if he was coming from a distance. But Silas couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling he had had ever since he found Verl Bissom hanging from the Onetree. If Horden didn’t show up by the end of the day, maybe he should send a message to the Mage Council, asking if plans had changed. On the other hand, until he had proof that the Mage Council had not ordered the assassination of the Hidden Council and their allies, he couldn’t trust anything they told him.
The day was hot, with a heavy stickiness in the air that signaled thunderstorms to come. After a long morning of shooting practice, Silas and Lainie retreated to the Dusty Demon for lunch. In the heat, the mood in the saloon was strained. A couple of games of Dragon’s Threes were in progress, but the games were tense, winners and losers alike throwing down their bets and their cards and snatching up their winnings with ill grace and foul temper. Silas suspected it was only due to sheer laziness and lethargy brought on by the heat that no fights had broken out yet. The only person who seemed unaffected by the weather was the hammerbox player, who was jangling away cheerfully at his instrument. Hot and tired and worried, and consequently in an irritable mood, Silas seriously considered taking some more target practice on the hammerbox, and on the player as well, for good measure.
Lunch was beans and salt pork baked in a sweet, spicy cactus-fruit syrup, and pan biscuits. As Silas and Lainie dug in, thunder rumbled in the near distance over the hills west of town, and the wind gusting past the swinging doors of the saloon brought a scent of rain. A moment later, a stronger gust rattled sand and gravel against the wooden wall of the saloon.
“Here it comes!” someone said. The barkeeper ran to the doorway and slammed the solid doors shut in front of the swinging doors. A heartbeat later, a tremendous gust of wind shook the building. The light outside the windows turned yellow-brown, and a roar punctuated with the sound of solid objects hitting the walls and roof filled the air. An instinctive fear of the storm stirred inside Silas, setting his senses on edge. Even though dust storms usually weren’t life-threatening and he had the safety of strong walls between him and the chaos outside, that didn’t change the eerie color of the light, the howling of the wind, the nerve-tingling energy in the air, or the sensation of being cut off from the rest of the world.
Lainie fidgeted with her fork, poking at her beans as she glanced at the windows and the thick, swirling cloud of dust beyond them. “I’m glad we’re inside, and not out there,” she said.
“It sounds bad, but there’s nothing to be scared of,” Silas answered. “We’re safe in here.” He tried to sound calm, to soothe her fear, but his own nerves were screaming at the violent energy of the storm. It felt almost like magic at work, but it would take at least three or four mages to summon up a storm this strong – mages who, if they were out there, had managed to completely evade his attempts to detect them.
“Storm buried my place out to Deadsnake six feet deep one time,” a man at one of the tables said. “Took me two days to tunnel out.”
Lainie went even paler than she already was, her freckles standing out against her skin. “You don’t reckon this storm’ll bury us alive, do you?” she asked Silas.
Silas directed a glare at the man. “No one’s going to get buried,” he said.
“I heard tell of a whole town buried,” the hotel clerk said. “Now it’s nothin’ but dunes out in the desert.”
At that instant, an even louder whoosh of sand and dirt hit the building. Lainie nearly jumped off her stool. Silas considered whether to make another attempt to soothe her or just shoot the men who were scaring her.
Then, all at once, the howling of the wind, the rushing of sand, and the pelting of blowing objects stopped, and the light cleared and brightened. “That was quick,” the barkeeper said. “Pursie, go open the doors.”
Silas’s house lady pulled open the storm doors, then peered over the top of the swinging doors. A heartbeat later, she let out a scream.
Shouts of “What is it? What happened?” filled the saloon, with Pursie’s screams rising above the commotion. Driven by a dreadful certainty, though he didn’t know exactly what he was certain of, Silas ran out the door and stopped short at the sight that met him.
In the street, the body of a man lay sprawled on its back in a spreading puddle of blood. With a cold twist of foreboding in his gut, Silas walked over to the body and squatted down beside it.
The man’s throat had been cut so deeply that his windpipe was laid completely open. Blood still trickled out from the wound. Something metal glimmered on the man’s chest – a silver ring set with a clear blue-green stone. Silas quickly pocketed the ring before anyone else could see it. It had the dull feel of a mage ring whose owner was no longer alive.
Silas reached out with his mage senses; an aura of violent magic that reminded him of the storm lingered around the scene. The man hadn’t been killed by magic, the knife wound made that clear, but a great deal of power – wild and uncontrolled – had been expended here. Had the storm been caused by magic after all, or at least enhanced by magic? Or was it the magical struggle between this man and the killer that he had sensed? The power had an alien flavor to it, too faint for Silas to be able to identify though he thought he should know what it was.
“Damn,” the barkeeper said, coming up behind Silas. The other men from the saloon trailed after him, seeming less than eager to come too close. “No s
torm did that.”
“Hell of a storm if it did,” Silas said. He touched the dead man’s face. A multitude of cuts, bruises, burns, and other injuries, both fresh and healing, suggested that he’d been tortured for some time before he was killed. “He’s still warm.”
“The killer must still be around here, then. Come on, boys!” the barkeeper called out. “Let’s get him!”
Shouting in excitement, the men from the saloon scattered in twos and threes.
“If you find any tracks, take care not to trample them!” Silas called after them, though he doubted any of them heard him or paid him any heed. Oh well; if they could at least tell him which way the killer had gone from town, he could pick up the trail from there.
Lainie walked over and crouched next to him, keeping her eyes averted from the dead man’s opened throat. “What do you think?” she asked quietly.
Silas knew who it was, and he was pretty sure she knew, too. He didn’t want to tell her about the mage ring, though, not in front of the handful of townsfolk still standing around. A large knapsack lay on the other side of the body. He reached for it and rooted around inside, and came up with a white handkerchief, which he unfolded and smoothed out. The initials GH were neatly embroidered in one corner.
Lainie clutched at his arm, suddenly unsteady. “I knew it.”
Silas replaced the kerchief in the knapsack, then stood up. “So, Garis Horden,” he said to the dead man. “We finally meet.”
Chapter 4
THE MEN WHO had gone in search of the killer returned a short time later, gathering in the street in front of the Dusty Demon. “No tracks or nothin’,” the hotel clerk said.