But it was not just anyone claiming all this. It was Need. She was caution personified. She never trusted anything or anyone entirely - even less than Skif. If his instincts said to check something twice, hers would move her to check it a dozen times. She simply did not rush into anything; she left that to her bearers.
It followed, then, that she had already done far more about this "informant" than she had told him. Perhaps that was why it had taken her so long to report it. She had said that she had not wanted to tell him of this before it was a reality - and she had plenty of time and opportunity, if distance was no great deterrent to this contact. When it came right down to it, he had no idea what her abilities really were. So.
He weighed everything he knew about Need and her ways and decided to ask two questions.
:How long have you been cultivating this contact?: he asked :Is there more about him you can't tell me yet?:
She chuckled, as if she had expected those very questions :That's what I like about you, Darkwind. You're a suspicious one. To answer your questions, there's quite a bit I can't tell you about him yet, and I've been in one form of contact or another with him for some time. My indirect contacts started even before we crossed the border. I can't tell you how it all came about, but I can promise you that those who put me in contact with him are trustworthy entities.:
Entities? An interesting choice of words. One could describe the Companions as "entities." Were the Companions behind this?
:Not exactly, but something very like the Companions. Someone you would trust if I could tell you:
Something - oh - like the Swordsworn, then? The Kal'enedral had certainly been helpful in the past with regard to Falconsbane.
Need laughed :Persistent, aren't you? And a good guesser, too.:
He nodded, and his hands relaxed. In that case - it must be leshy'a Kal'enedral; that would explain a great deal. What the spirit-Kal'enedral were doing in Hardorn he had no idea, but poor Tre'valen had said that She had told him the interests of the Shin'a'in were now carrying beyond the Plains. Perhaps this was one of the things She had meant.
:Do I take it that you are bringing this through me and not through Nyara to spare her distress?: He could well imagine what unhappiness receiving any information about her father at this moment would cause. She didn't enjoy being used as bait for him, but it was the one useful thing she could think to contribute. He suspected that a burning desire for revenge held her steady in the day-today strain of being "staked out" like a stalking-horse. And as for actually seeing Mornelithe face-to-face again - he was certain that Nyara tried not to think of that. She probably tried not to think of him at all. This would not help her precarious peace of mind.
:Precisely.:Need seemed very satisfied with his sensitivity :Ah - have you noticed that on the whole she is looking and acting more - human? One of the things my time with her has accomplished is that I am able to find the memories of what the Beast did to her. Knowing that, I can do some things to reverse his changes.:Need sounded smug again. He did not in the least blame her.
:I'm no god or Avatar, but there are a few things I can still do.:
:I had noticed. My plaudits, Lady. You may not call yourself Adept, but you cannot be far from one.:He smiled at her raspy chuckle.
:So, can I count on you to break this to the others? If you want to make it sound as if you've been in on this from the beginning, that's fine, if it makes the rest more inclined to trust the information.:Need apparently felt that she required his support on this; very well, she would have it. He assented readily. This was too great an opportunity to allow anything to spoil it.
:There is one small blessing in Nyara's lack of confidence in herself, Lady,: he pointed out :Poor little thing, she has been so used to thinking of herself as useless that it will not even occur to her that you might have brought this word to her, and not me.:
He sensed something like a sigh from her :Sad, but true. Well, Skif and I are working on that. And if all of this falls out as best as possible, she'II have a boost in that direction.:
The next village was coming up; he saw the huddle of buildings through a curtain of trees just beyond the first wagon. He could deal with all of this later. Right now there was a persona to keep up, a show to stage, and hopefully there would be no trouble from Ancar's men to complicate matters.
However, on that last, the odds weren't with them, and he knew it only too well.
The carnival-wagons drew nearer the cluster of buildings, then entered the edge of the town. He and Elspeth both sensed the tension as they drove through the village. The townspeople did not even gather to watch them as they passed through; instead, they watched furtively from their windows and doorways, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. Their faces were even more haggard than was usual in Hardorn.
As the procession reached the common, the reason for the tension became clear.
More of Ancar's Elite, some in armor and some only in uniform, were gathered outside a large building on the edge of the common to watch them pull in. It looked as if there were about twenty or thirty of them. He had no idea what so many of the Elite were doing here in this tiny town; it seemed that they were garrisoned here on a permanent basis, but there didn't seem to be a reason for a garrison. No one in the last town had bothered to warn them about this - and it was something new since the last time any of the wagon-folk had been here.
Whatever it was that caused the Elite to be here - well, the carnival was running a risk in setting up tonight. The Elite always had money and few enough places to spend it. But one of the reasons that they always had money was that they were in the habit of taking whatever they wanted. They seldom needed to actually buy anything, and when they did - well, there were always plenty of people to steal more money from under the guise of "donations for the troops."
Still, it was difficult to force a good performance out of an artist. A frightened musician forgot words and music; a terrified dancer would move like a wooden doll. A juggler under duress dropped things. And no one could give any kind of a performance with a sword at his throat, or a knife pointed at a loved one. The effect of terror on a performer would only be funny for a limited number of times before the amusement began to pall. If luck was with them, some of these men had figured that out by now.
The routine was the same as always, but the tension had spread to everyone else in the troupe by the time all the tents and wagons were set up. Darkwind's stomach was in an uproar and his shoulders a mass of knots before they even set up the tent. And before the customers began to trickle in, word was passing among the wagon-folk; sensible word, by Darkwind's way of thinking.
Ancar's men were to be given anything they expressed an interest in. Free food, free entertainment, free drink. Smile at the nice soldiers, and tell them fervently how much you supported them. Encourage them to toss coin in a hat if you must have it, but do not charge them, ran the advice. If we get out of here whole, that will be enough. He passed on the advice to the others, who agreed fervently. There was no point in antagonizing these men, and if they were in a good mood and remained so, they might even avoid more trouble later.
"Hoo, I'll give them bottles of Cure-All if they'll take it!" Firesong said fervently. "In fact...hmm...that's not a bad idea. They'll be stuffing themselves from the Mystery Meat sellers. All that grease would give a goat a belly-ache. I'll prescribe Cure-Ail to the ones that look bilious. It's a lot stronger than anything they're used to gulping down, and given all the soothing herbs in it, it might make them pleasant drunks. If nothing else, it will knock them out much more quickly than the ale."
That was a notion that had a lot of merit. "Mention it has a base of brandy-wine in your selling speech, Firesong," Darkwind advised. "That will surely catch their interest. Something like - ah - 'made of the finest brandy-wine, triply distilled, of vintage grapes trodden out by virgin girls in the full of the moon, and laden with the sacred herbs of the forest gods guaranteed to put heat in an old man and fire in a yo
ung one, to make weeping women smile and young maidens dance - ' How does that sound?"
"You know, you are good at that." Firesong gave him a strained, ironic half-smile.
"Perhaps I should consider making an honest living," Darkwind replied with heavy irony.
"Sounds good enough to make me drink it, and I made the last batch," Skif observed, coming around the corner of the tent. "And I've got an idea. Nyara doesn't dance. It's too dangerous; maybe we can hold four or five armed men off her, but we can't take on thirty. And if ten of them are in the tent, that's twenty somewhere outside where you can't see them. Tonight, the performance in the tent is you, the birds, and Darkwind. Nyara stays hidden. They don't know she's here, so let's not stretch our luck by letting them see her."
"I wish this," Nyara said from the dark of the wagon, her voice trembling in a way that made Darkwind ache with pity for her. How many times had her father made her perform in just such a way for his men? "I greatly wish this. What need have we of showing my face here and now? And there will be no one expecting shared monies tonight, yes?"
"Quite true," Elspeth said firmly. "After all, the last thing that anyone in this carnival wants is to give these men any cause at all to make trouble, and one look at Nyara will make trouble. In fact, I'm going over to the contortionists' tent and advise all their women stay out of sight, too."
It seemed to be a consensus.
While they readied the tent for the shows, Darkwind related everything Need had told him. The news was enough to make everyone a little more cheerful, so when the Elite did show up, Firesong was able to give them a good performance.
At first, only one of the Elite would accept a bottle of the Cure-All. From the grimace on his face, he had eaten far too much of what Firesong called "Mystery Meat," and far too many greasy fried pies. He took the Cure-Ail dubiously, with much jibing from his friends -
Until he downed the first swallow, and came up sputtering. His face was a study in astonishment.
"That bad, eh, Kaven?" one of them laughed.
"Hellfires no," the man exclaimed, wiping his face on the back of his arm and going back for another pull. "That good! This here's prime drink!" With one bottle at his lips, he was already reaching toward Firesong, who divined his intention and quickly gave him a second flask. He polished off the first bottle, and got halfway through the second, with his mates watching with great interest, when the alcohol caught up with him. He took the bottle from his mouth, corked it carefully, and stowed it in the front of his tunic. Then, with a beatific smile on his face, he passed out cold, falling over backward like a stunned ox.
Firesong ran out of Cure-All immediately, but he made certain that every man of the Elite got at least one bottle. After that, they could fight it out among themselves.
Some of them did, in fact; brawling in the "streets" between the wagons in a display of undiscipline that should have shamed them, but which seemed, from the lack of intervention by the officers, to be standard behavior.
Thereafter, they wandered the carnival, bottles in one hand and whatever had taken their fancy in the other, moving from one entertainer to the next. While they were sober, Firesong and Darkwind took pains to make certain that they never repeated a trick from one show to the next - and in desperation, they were using small feats of real magic instead of sleight-of-hand. But once the men were drank, it made no difference, for they could not remember what they had just seen, much less what they had seen in the show before. The small size of the tent was a definite advantage now, for only ten of them could crowd in at a time, which meant they never had the same audience twice in a row. But the alcohol fumes were enough to dizzy the birds, and the stench of unwashed bodies was enough to choke a sheep.
As darkness fell, the aisles between the wagons were both too crowded and too empty. The Elite filled it with their swaggering presence. There were no townsfolk brave enough to dare the carnival; the Elite held it all to themselves. By now all of the Faire-folk were knotted with fear and starting at any odd sound. This was horribly like being under siege. Darkwind wondered grimly why they had not helped themselves to the women of the town, as they seemed to help themselves to everything else, but Skif had an answer for that when he murmured the question out loud.
"Any attractive women that have relatives out of town are probably gone to those relatives," Skif told them. "Those that are left are being very careful never to be where one of the Elite can grab them without a lot of fuss. These men aren't totally undisciplined, and even if Ancar doesn't care what they do, their local commander knows that if they take their excesses beyond a little bullying and petty pilfering, the whole town will revolt. He doesn't want that; he has a quota of goods or food he has to meet, and he can't do that without the local labor. But we're outsiders, so we're fair prey. No one here will care if anything happens to us."
A good reason for the women of the carnival to stay out of sight....
At that moment, shouts and pain-filled cries rang out above the noise of the peddlers and entertainers - exactly what Darkwind had been dreading, yet expecting.
Thirty-one bodies lay unconscious in the middle of the carnival, laid out in neat rows; two of the peddlers were bringing in the thirty-second and last. Virtually all of the rest of the wagon-folk were getting their animals from the picket lines and hitching up.
These two men, a pair of burly drivers, hauled him by wrists and ankles. They let him drag on the ground, taking no care to be gentle, and flung him down beside the rest.
Every one of these men had collapsed where he stood, within moments of the first cry. Most of them had been within a few feet of the victim.
Firesong knelt at the end of one of the rows, his face gray with exhaustion. He was responsible for the mass collapse, and it had taken everything he had; an ordinary and simple spell of sleep had been made far more complicated by the need to target only the Elite, and to strike all of them at once. This was more complicated than either Darkwind or Elspeth could handle, and he had acted while they were still trying to organize themselves. Firesong's spell had taken long enough to set up that some of the damage had already been done.
The victim of the attack was one of the peddlers; not a particularly feminine-looking lad, but beardless and, most importantly, alone at the moment when four of the Elite came upon him, completely alone, in between two sets of deserted stalls. At this point, the Elite had all realized that there were no females anywhere in the carnival; that there would be no sexual favors here. His stock-in-trade, ribbons, were something none of the men wanted, but they did serve as a reminder that there were none of the easy - or at least, accessible - women they had anticipated getting their hands on.
As Darkwind understood it, the only warning the young man had was when the first four soldiers began an argument with him, claiming they had been cheated. Since he hadn't given away a ribbon all night, much less sold any, he hadn't the faintest notion what they meant and had tried to back his way out of the situation.
Then they had surrounded him, informed him that what they had been cheated of was women, and told him he'd just have to make it up to them.
By then, there were ten, not four, and he hadn't a chance. By the time the first four had pushed him to the ground, there were even more.
One man, at least, had beaten the lad before Firesong's spell took effect.
This had all been an incredible shock to Firesong, who had spent all of his life in the Vales. Darkwind was not foolish enough to think that molestion was unknown among his people - but it was very uncommon, given that most women and men could very well defend themselves against an attacker. As a scout, he had seen the worst possible behavior on the part of Falconsbane's men and creatures and had some armoring against what had come. Firesong had no such protection; Firesong was a rare and precious commodity, a Healing Adept, and as such he had been protected more than the ordinary Hawkbrother.
He had never seen anyone victimized like the boy. Others, who had MindHealing skil
ls, would have dealt with such cases, which would probably have involved an enemy from outside the Vale. It was the attack itself that had him in shock, far more than the drain on his resources.
Darkwind had never thought to feel pity for the handsome Adept - but he did now, and he longed to be able to give Firesong some comfort in the name of clean and uncomplicated friendship. But there was too much to do, and no time for such niceties.
Darkwind laid a hand gently on Elspeth's shoulder. "Are you ready?" he asked. "It's our turn now."
She nodded, her mouth in a tight, grim line.
"I don't like this, you know," she said conversationally, although he sensed the anger under the casual tone. "If it were up to me, these bastards would all wake up eunuchs - if I let them wake up at all. I'd rather get rid of them altogether. Permanently. Let their gods sort them out."
"If it were my judgment, I would agree with you." He shook his head and sighed. If this were home, he could do as she preferred without a second thought. But it was not; they were not alone, they could not fade into the scenery and vanish. More importantly, however, neither could the people of the carnival and town.
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