The calm certainty in her voice was like an edict uttered by a magistrate, as if a thousand men in steel plate were standing by, ready to enforce it. As if I was one of them. It was almost overpowering.
“Why?” I tried to make the question a taunt, a dismissal—at least the start to another argument. Instead it came out sounding hurt, and utterly genuine.
Sha’maat’s eyes glimmered with the barest touch of tears. “Because despite everything you think about yourself, for all your cleverness, you have one great weakness, brother. You yearn for a family. You crave love. They will discover that about you, these Daroman barbarians. Be careful that they don’t destroy you with it.”
As she closed the door behind her, my sister said, “Happy birthday, Kellen. I wish I had better presents to bring you.”
The trouble with house-training an outlaw isn’t getting them to stop lying; it’s getting them to understand that just because they used to lie for a living, doesn’t mean other people aren’t a whole lot better at it than they are.
19
Imaginary Conversations
The carriage barrelled its way along the Northern Daroman Imperial Way, the trees and foliage lining the route becoming ever sparser as we reached colder climes. The countess’s carriage was pretty to look at, its black lacquered exterior accented with silver gilding and the elaborate crimson rose-and-sword sigil of her house embossed into the doors on either side, but entirely unsuited to the rigours of long-haul travel. The rougher the road became, the more the wheels of the carriage diligently relayed every bump and dip directly to my buttocks. Nevertheless, the unforgiving wooden seats were nothing compared to my travelling companion as far as giving me a pain in the arse was concerned. Countess Mariadne’s silences were decidedly loud in their effect, and by the second day I’d had just about enough.
“Any reason why your driver is trying to outrun the wind?” I asked.
The countess kept her face in her book despite how little light was coming in from the late afternoon sun. “The faster we get there, the sooner I’ll be done with this farce,” she said. “And with you in particular.”
“Me? How exactly am I to blame for your predicament, countess?”
“Oh, on that account you may take comfort, Master Kel—”
“Mister,” I corrected.
Reichis grumbled. “Of all of Ferius’s stupid habits, this is the one you want to adopt?”
Countess Mariadne wrinkled her nose as though the squirrel cat had just farted. Maybe he had; the interior of the carriage was smelling a bit ripe. “As you please. Regardless, you have my assurance, Mister Kellen, that you are not even the slightest bit to blame for my ‘predicament’, as you call it. The loss of my husband these five years, the constant attacks on my border, the fact that my own cousin, the queen, refuses to overturn the unfair and unconscionable sentence given to my closest companion—these are the sources of my torment. You, by contrast, are nothing more than the queen’s fool, sent to entertain himself at my expense.”
“Entertain myself?” I leaned forward in my seat just enough to make her uncomfortable. “Lady, you seem to be under the impression that I want to be here instead of back at the palace where I have a comfortable room and at least the vague possibility of pleasant conversation. Allow me clear things up for you: in the past eight days I’ve had lightning thrown at me by a war mage, been knocked unconscious by a marshal’s mace, almost had my face taken off by a Zhuban fanatic, been condemned to the gallows for accidentally wiping blood on your people’s stupid flag, and—because up till then it had been a light week—been attacked by a damned flying snake. None of which, your ladyship, holds a candle to the raw unpleasantness of your company.”
The countess looked dumbstruck by my tirade. I took advantage of the situation to lean back in my seat, lowering my hat just enough to cover my eyes and end the conversation.
Reichis snorted. “Good to know your winning streak with women is holding solid.”
“Go sniff your own backside” I muttered.
“What?” Mariadne shouted, slamming her book down on her lap.
“I was talking to him,” I said.
She looked around briefly, then her eyes settled on Reichis. “Ah. Of course. You talk to your… rodent.”
“Squirrel cat,” Reichis said with a warning snarl.
“Is it wild? I think it’s growling at me.” She sounded not so much afraid as affronted.
“‘It’ is a squirrel cat, not a rodent,” I corrected, with as much imperiousness as I could muster. “And ‘it’ has a name, which happens to be Reichis.”
The countess looked from Reichis to me as if I was making fun of her. “And you talk to this… squirrel cat, do you?”
I nodded.
“And does he talk back?”
I snorted. “All he does is talk back.”
“Leave me out of this,” Reichis chittered, sticking his muzzle out of the carriage’s side window.
Mariadne let out her breath and made a show of pausing before speaking. “Master Kellen—”
“Mister. Among my peop—”
“Whatever. Mister Kellen, has anyone ever suggested that you entertain the possibility that your pet rodent—or squirrel cat, or whatever you want to call it—is an animal, that animals don’t talk, and that you’re just imagining that this one talks to you?”
I started to reply, when an uncomfortable thought occurred to me. Despite what happened when Sha’maat was around, I’d never really questioned the fact that Reichis and I could talk to each other. On the surface, it seemed completely natural. After all, mages communicate with their familiars through their thoughts. Why shouldn’t I be able to talk to Reichis? But then, I’m not a proper mage and would never be one. When I thought about it, I couldn’t think of any other magical adepts who actually spoke—not thought or projected or whatever it was they did, but used actual words—back and forth with an animal. But the queen had spoken to Reichis too, hadn’t she? Unless I really was out of my mind and she’d just been making fun of me. I thought back to the last two years as I looked over at the squirrel cat.
“Don’t look at me,” Reichis said. “I always thought you were crazy.”
Countess Mariadne gave me a look that was half genuine concern and half triumphant smugness. That’s when I noticed the redness around her eyes and the dampness of her cheeks. She’d been crying; that was why she’d been keeping her face behind that book the whole trip. She noticed me staring at her, and embarrassment quickly turned to outrage. “How dare you look at me like—”
I was rescued by Reichis chittering loudly. “Horses coming, Kellen!”
“What? Who? How many?”
He sniffed out the window. “A lot.”
“What is it?” Mariadne asked.
“Someone’s on our tail,” I said, pushing Reichis out of the way so I could stick my head out the window. About two hundred yards to the right of us I could just make out a dirty brown cloud getting closer. Whoever they were, they were riding hard, just off-road and on a path to intercept us.
I pulled my powder holsters out of my travel bag and attached them to my belt. Next I strapped my deck of steel throwing cards around my right thigh. Finally, I unpacked the pair of long knives I’d taken off good old Merrel of Betrian and stuck them in my belt.
“How can you tell we’re being pursued?” Mariadne asked. “I don’t hear anything.”
I jabbed my thumb at Reichis. “My imaginary talking rodent told me.”
The countess snorted and started to speak but another voice interrupted her.
“Men coming, my lady,” the driver shouted down to us. “Bandits, I fear. At least six of them.”
Six bandits on horseback. We were screwed.
I flipped open the covers of my powder holsters and then spat on my fingers, then lightly rubbed them on my trousers. Wet fingertips are a bad idea, but damp ones make it easier to hold the powder.
“What are you doing?” Mariadne aske
d.
I opened the door and found a grip for my right hand on the inside edge of the carriage. The wind slapped at my cheeks as if it were trying to get my attention. Maybe it was trying to warn me that this was all a little too inconvenient even for my luck.
“Getting ready to kill our new friends,” I replied.
Barely two days out of the palace and we were being attacked by just enough men to prevent our escape. It didn’t strike me as coincidence. Sha’maat could have arranged this to ensure the countess was killed. If that was the case, there was a good argument for jumping off the carriage and making a run for it before I got caught up in the attack. On the other hand, Colfax might have hired men to see me dead, and leaving the carriage would just make it easier for them to run me down.
“You’re being ridiculous,” the countess said. “This is Darome. We have laws. Whoever they are, they don’t dare harry us on the queen’s highway.”
“We’re almost two days’ ride from the capital, your ladyship.” I set my foot against the window of the open door and began pulling myself up to the roof. “I’ve been wandering the long roads a while now, and one thing I’ve learned in that time: laws count only where there are men and women who care to enforce them.”
20
Horseplay
It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the glare of the late-afternoon sun. The rush of air atop the carriage threatened to separate my hat from my head. The thunder of hoofs getting ever closer threatened to separate my head from my neck. “Keep your speed up,” I told the driver.
The old man nodded once, his eyes on the road and his hands on the reins. “Name’s Erras,” he said.
“Kellen.”
“Have you a plan, Kellen?”
I pulled the two knives from my belt and jammed the points into the seat next to me so the handles were sticking up.
Erras glanced down at the knives. “There’s at least six riders following us. You got any more knives?”
I tapped the leather deck case strapped to my thigh.
The retainer raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to gamble them to death?”
The wind shifted direction and the specks of dirt from our wheels billowed up to cover us in a fog of dust and grit. The terrain was the same as it had been before, sparse silvery-barked trees and bare bushes whistling past, but the shrinking distance between us and our pursuers made it feel as if the world were collapsing around us.
“They’ll be on us any minute now,” the driver warned.
I gave the old man credit for the even tone in his voice. When bandits run down a carriage, they often take the passengers for ransom. Drivers? Not so much. The best Erras could hope for, if we were overpowered, would be a swift blade to the belly. As for me, I was starting to miss that itchy, silver shirt Arex had given me; at least if I were clothed in poncy finery I might look wealthy enough to capture instead of kill.
Reichis crawled up between us on the driver’s seat. They say human beings are the only creatures that smile. Whoever “they” are, they haven’t met my business partner. The little monster loves a nasty fight.
Mariadne shouted up to us. “Erras, stop the carriage. I’ll talk to these men, whoever they are.”
“My lady—”
“I said, stop this carriage!”
Erras looked at me helplessly and started pulling back on the reins. I pushed his hands forward to let the reins slack again.
“You stop this carriage and she’s dead,” I said.
“She’s my—”
“Would you rather work for an irate employer or a quiet corpse?” I asked.
Erras shook his head hopelessly and whipped the reins to keep the horses at speed.
The first man broke through the cloud of dust to our right, riding hard to intercept us. He had a hard steel cap over his head, and billowing fabric around his shoulders and face kept in place by leather straps. His sword had a nasty double-curve to it. This guy wasn’t some highway bandit. “Zhuban warriors,” I said, reaching into my holsters.
Whatever hesitation Erras might have felt moments ago disappeared when he heard that. “Hyah!” he shouted to the horses. “Hyah, hyah!”
The Zhuban swordsman was about thirty feet away, weapon held straight out at us. He’ll try to spook me with a feint, then slash at the horses. If he injures one of them it’ll fall into the other and the carriage will go down. Then he and his friends will have all the time in the world to slaughter us at their leisure.
“Carath Toth!” I shouted, tossing red and black powder into the air as I made the somatic gesture. The problem with spellslinging on a moving carriage is that if you misjudge the wind, you end up sending your own hair up in flames. A bolt of fire and hate shot out and blessedly struck the man straight in the face. His body slumped back but his horse kept coming, and I heard Mariadne scream as she saw the bloody wreckage of his still-burning skull slam against the window of the carriage.
Our own horses, ignoring the fact that I’d just saved their lives, nearly took us over the steep ridge on our right side. Erras pulled hard on the reins, bringing the beasts back into the middle of the road.
“Two more coming in,” Reichis said, his body coiled to jump off the right side of the carriage at one of the approaching attackers.
“Not yet!” I shouted. “You’ll end up too far behind us when the others get here.”
A pair of warriors came up on our right side, one slightly ahead of the other. I dipped my hands back in my holsters. The trouble with my blast spell is that it requires two separate powders to work. I need both hands to cast it, which means I can only target one enemy at a time. Right now I had two Zhuban swordsmen coming for me, both equally keen to soak their long, double-curved blades with my blood. One of them had a particularly excited gleam in his eye, though, and since enthusiasm for one’s work should always be rewarded, I decided he’d be heading for the great Zhuban Wheel of Destiny first.
I aimed carefully, using the lesser variant of the spell to preserve my own fingers. “Carath,” I intoned. My first shot missed, leaving me with barely enough time to pull powder and try again before the two warriors would be on us. “Carath,” I said a second time, a distinctly pleading tone to my voice. My ancestors rarely show much affection for me, but they must have found my pathetic plea entertaining because the blast took my opponent right in the throat. He died without so much as a scream. Better still, his horse careened into that of his fellow warrior, knocking the other man from his saddle. I hoped the faltering beast would land on top of him and save me the trouble of killing him later.
“What’s happening? Who are these men?” Mariadne shouted to us, leaning her head out of the right-side window, practically daring some enterprising swordsman to take her head.
“Just stay in the damned carriage,” I shouted back.
“The other three are coming around behind us, Kellen,” Reichis chittered. “I’m taking the one in the lead.”
“Be careful,” I warned. “These aren’t sandal-wearing grunts. They look like Zhuban Front Cavalry.”
The squirrel cat snorted. “A skinbag is a skinbag.”
As the leader came up close behind us and started reaching for the back of the carriage, Reichis leaped up from the bench, his limbs spread wide to catch enough breeze to glide right onto the warrior’s back. “Death strikes from above!” the little monster roared joyously as he started ripping chunks out of the back of his enemy’s head and neck. “No stinkin’ human defeats a squirrel cat!”
I ignored the screams as I pulled powder from my holsters and aimed at the last two of our attackers. They were trying to swing around the left side where they could kill Erras and drive the carriage over the ridge. Reichis’s opponent was still in front though, swinging his blade wildly while screaming a series of what I suspected were rather insistent Zhuban curses. His confused and terrified horse weaved all over the road, getting in the way of the two warriors behind. The little squirrel cat was spitting bits of human
flesh at them even as he dodged the desperate swings of his victim. Show-off.
The other two quickly abandoned their comrade. I took a gamble and pulled two heavy pinches of powder. The Zhuban warriors were just close enough to each other that I could try for a blast big enough to cover them both. The more powder, the more dangerous the spell, and the more likely that I’d just blow my own hands off. I made the gesture carefully—index and middle fingers pointed straight towards my enemies, ring and small fingers pressed hard against my palm, thumbs up to the sky.
“Carath Toth!”
The blast was bigger than I intended—enough to feel the sparse whiskers on my cheeks stinging. But at the last instant the two men had split apart, each heading for opposite sides of the carriage, the red and black fires of my spell splitting the air cleanly between them. I’d missed. Worse, I couldn’t try another shot—my fingers were too singed and there was no way I could attempt the spell again so soon. I flipped open the leather pouch holding my steel throwing cards and drew a pair. “Go to the left side!” I shouted to Mariadne.
“What? Why? What are you—”
I rolled over the top of the carriage roof and got to my feet just in time to find a Zhuban warrior standing on his horse’s saddle, sword held high. He delivered a slash that would’ve sliced off my ankles had I not leaped up in time. I landed awkwardly though, stumbling on the roof of the carriage, desperately trying to regain my balance as my opponent brought his sword around for a second attack. Screw it, I thought, and let myself fall even as I flicked my wrist to send a pair of steel cards spinning through the air. I’m a pretty good shot with the cards—not as good as Ferius, of course, but I can reliably hit the bullseye on a saloon dartboard from ten paces away. Of course, the dartboard isn’t usually riding a fast horse and the floor of the saloon isn’t tossing me up and down relentlessly.
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