The Aisling Trilogy

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The Aisling Trilogy Page 21

by Cummings, Carole


  “Hm.” Locke nodded reluctant agreement. “In light of what you said last night, and after I talked again to Miri this morning, I think I agree with you. What she says fits with your theory… it’s not even good as far as circumstantial evidence, but it makes a certain kind of sense. And I expect that if your friend could do that, he wouldn’t still be locked in a cell.”

  “True.” Dallin stared down into his tea. “Listen…” He slid his mug to the desk, shifted uncomfortably. “The things I did find out, if what he told me today can be trusted as truth…” Another heavy sigh tendriled from him and he rubbed at his brow. “I may have to… miss whatever orders come from Putnam.”

  Locke looked him over shrewdly, silently, then: “Because if you never get the orders, you won’t have to disobey them.”

  Dallin liked this woman more, every time he talked to her. Which made him feel like a complete shit for what he was going to have to do to her. Unaware of his internal fits of conscience, Locke sat back, closed her eyes, raised both hands and massaged at her temples. Dallin had been right about the gun earlier—a mean-looking snubbed shotgun rested over her thick thighs.

  “This,” she said tiredly, “must be bloody huge.”

  “It is,” Dallin told her. “And please believe me when I tell you that my lack of forthcoming on the matter is as much for your protection as it is for…” He kept stumbling over the name. “…for Wil’s.” He looked at her seriously. “And the Commonwealth’s.”

  She nodded, still obviously not happy with being kept in the dark, but apparently willing to trust a fellow officer. It made Dallin feel somewhat low and foul.

  “When will you go?” was all she asked.

  Dallin shrugged, relieved that she wasn’t going to make this more difficult than it already was. “How much time can you give me?”

  She waved her hand toward the cell. “Your… friend needs at least another day or two before he’ll be fit to travel. And I don’t expect we’ll hear from Putnam for another… say three days, at least.” She eyed Dallin with the lift of an eyebrow.

  “I’ll take two,” Dallin said. “Thank you.”

  “And where are you going to, then?”

  Dallin sighed, leaned back in his chair and looked down at his lap. He couldn’t look her in the eye and say what he meant to say next. “It seems that the answers I need are all in Ríocht. I imagine I’ll start there.”

  “You’re going to cross the Border?” Real alarm flashed over her face. “And you plan to drag that… him with you?”

  “Well, I can’t leave him here, can I?”

  She shook her head in too obvious disapproval and sincere worry. “He’s going to slow you down at the least, get you killed more likely.”

  “Maybe.” Dallin stood, kept his gaze on his tea. “But he’s in trouble.”

  “He is trouble,” Locke objected.

  Dallin puffed out a snort, sloshed his tea. “No, not really. But trouble does follow him, no matter how fast he runs.” For the first time since he’d broached the subject, he lifted his gaze back to the sheriff’s. “I can’t kill him and I can’t leave him to his own devices. He’s part of the answer. He might be all of it, for all I know. Until I have all of them I need, he stays where I can see him.”

  She wasn’t convinced, Dallin could see it, but she wouldn’t get in his way, and he truly had no more energy for it tonight. He let the silence sink in, let his mind push everything away until it was clearer and he could make more sense out of the nonsensical.

  More exhausted than he could remember ever having been before, Dallin left it there, drained the mug, slouched into the open cell and threw himself on the tiny cot. He thought about taking his boots off, hanging up his guns, but it seemed like too much work. “Wake me if you need me,” he managed then plunged headlong into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  ***

  The light was just going from gray to a light, watery yellow when the shouting woke him. He was asleep one second, wide awake the next, with his right hand on the butt of his gun, before he realized there was no real alarm. And when the initial surge of adrenaline wore off a little, his next task was to decide whether to growl or laugh.

  “They were mine,” Wil was shouting—none of the warbling fear from yesterday in his voice, but real anger and furious indignation. “You had no right, I didn’t say you could, you never even asked!”

  Locke’s voice came next, even and hard, but with obvious bewilderment beneath it: “As I said, they were past repair. There was nothing else to be done with them, and now you’ve better to replace them with.”

  Dallin got up slowly, padded quietly to the open door of the cell, and stretched his neck to get a look. Wil was standing just inside his cell, barefoot and bare-chested, a wad of what looked like the deerskin shirt Dallin had given him yesterday in his hand. Locke stood just outside the open door, a pair of soft leather boots held in her outstretched hand. Wil looked cautiously enraged; Locke looked… interested. She didn’t seem angry at the insolence Dallin doubted she’d have taken from a normal prisoner—she looked like someone poking at a wild animal, just to see what it would do.

  “I don’t want ‘better,’” Wil told her through his teeth, “I want mine.”

  “Yours,” Locke answered, dropped the boots to the floor, “are gone.”

  Dallin maneuvered himself out into the office, ventured a mild, “Um… hullo?” They both turned to look his way, Locke with a bemused lift of an eyebrow; Wil with a fierce, offended scowl. He lifted his bandaged hand, pointed it at the sheriff, looking for all the world like a lad tattling on his sister.

  “She,” he said crossly, “took my boots!”

  Dallin stared. Blinked slowly. Said, “Sorry?” It came out gruff and grainy, so he cleared his throat. “Boots?”

  “She took them,” Wil repeated, like it was the highest form of insult imaginable and he couldn’t get over the audacity.

  “They were falling apart,” Locke put in calmly, speaking to Wil in a manner that suggested to Dallin that she’d repeated this argument several times over, and was convinced that if she said it slowly and clearly enough, the sense of it would eventually sink in. “Afton was kind enough to bring you some things that her Esmond left behind, and I should think you might be grateful, instead of throwing a tantrum like a spoilt six-year-old.”

  It was the ‘spoilt’ comment, had to be; the indignant outrage in Wil’s eyes dropped like a landslide directly into aggressive fury. He pulled himself up to his full height—Dallin was abstractly surprised to note that Wil had at least an inch on Locke; he kept forgetting how tall Wil was—squared his shoulders and leaned in. Dallin almost stepped up, but Locke could certainly handle herself and he was intensely interested in how this was going to play out.

  He never got the chance to find out. Wil opened his mouth for some no doubt cutting epithets when several gunshots rang out from the direction of the road. Locke spun and drew her gun in one motion. Dallin’s own gun was already in his hand before he’d taken his first instinctive step. And then the shutters on the barred doors splintered inward with a concussion that rang his ears, and Locke’s head disappeared in a spray of scarlet.

  “Get down!” Dallin shouted, already sprinting in a crouch toward the door. He saw through acrid smoke and an adrenaline haze Locke’s body with its ruined face slumping and falling as he passed, Wil’s arms outstretched to catch her. The weight of her was taking Wil to the floor. Dallin dismissed them both, vaulted to the wreckage of the doors and carefully peered out through the fragmented pieces of it in time to see a man he identified immediately as one of the Brethren go down in a hail of arrows and bullets coming from an upper story of the hostel. Shouts were coming from the direction of the livery and a bell was ringing somewhere, sporadic gunfire punching holes in the gray dawn.

  Dallin shot a glance over his shoulder at Wil, now trying to drag his legs out from under the dead weight of Locke. Blood covered his face and bare chest, dripped from his hair. H
is eyes were wide and shock-wild inside their mask of blood and gore.

  “Is any of that yours?” Dallin wanted to know.

  Wil looked up at him like he’d forgotten Dallin was even there, gave his head a quick jerk back and forth.

  “Stay here,” Dallin ordered. “Find cover and stay down ‘til I come back for you.”

  He didn’t wait to see if Wil answered or obeyed, but kicked open the remains of the doors and rolled out onto the porch. Three concussions followed him, thumping into the wood and splintering it in little forests of matchstick slivers as he rolled, the sound of the shots themselves reaching him a half-second later. You never hear the one that gets you was an oft-repeated adage by veterans of any profession that involved being a target, and Dallin had experienced evidence enough in his life to know the truth of it without the solid proof of having actually been shot. Shot at lots of times, and it never got any more pleasant, but he intended to keep the ‘not shot’ streak going.

  Answering fire came from the hostel again, and from around the far corner of the apothecary.

  He kept rolling, shots following him all the way, until he dumped himself off the edge of the porch and behind the bushes hedging it. He slithered in the dirt ‘til he reached the corner of the building. Bullets were raining down where he’d been seconds ago, concentrating on where they thought he was, rather than paying attention to where he’d gone. A grim little sneer pressed at his mouth and he gritted his teeth. Idiots. They had no idea what they were doing. He should probably be thanking the Mother they didn’t learn lessons very easily.

  The low chirp of a robin came from behind him, nearly forgotten code from his army days. Dallin dared a look around the corner at his back and down the end of the building. Newell was back there, crouched at the far corner, rifle laid across his thighs. He held up three fingers then pointed over Dallin’s left shoulder toward the abandoned shack sitting obliquely aslant to the apothecary that, by the faded sign hanging from rusty chains on its frontispiece, Dallin guessed had once served as a mercantile. Dallin had figured the direction, but not the number, and he nodded a little.

  Keeping low, he pointed back at Newell and then to the office. Newell gave a slight nod then disappeared around the corner. Almost straight away, a shot came from the direction Newell had gone, the robin’s call following immediately in its wake. Newell must have surprised one of them trying to sneak in from a backdoor that wasn’t there. Dallin shook his head. They hadn’t even bothered to do proper recon. Bloody idiots. Which was a blessing, in its way, but if these men had successfully stormed the Guild as Wil said they’d done, Dallin couldn’t imagine how. The ineptitude of the Guild’s defenses must be boggling.

  He eyed the landscape with a grimace. To get around to the back of the mercantile, he was going to have to sprint out in the open between the sheriff’s office and the apothecary, and had no way to signal the men in the hostel to provide some covering fire. In fact, he had no way to signal that they shouldn’t shoot him, and would have to hope that his light hair and size would speak for his status as friend and not foe.

  It turned out that he’d worried for nothing. Newell had apparently got to his position on the other corner of the office and done Dallin’s signaling for him. When Dallin finally broke cover and started his sprint, shots pelted the front of the mercantile from both the hostel and the livery until he was relatively safe behind the apothecary. Bless Newell and all veterans.

  Dallin spotted three men in the street, crouching low and moving carefully, trying to make their way into the hostel itself and likely take the snipers out by surprise. Dallin wondered why Newell hadn’t opened fire yet. Dallin judged the range, decided the new revolver could make the stretch, then stepped out between the buildings, took them out himself. Fast and with no fuss. He checked to make sure they’d stopped moving, then stepped around the corner again.

  From there, it was a simple matter of finding a backdoor to the derelict mercantile—surprisingly guarded this time; they were learning. Dallin had surprise on his side, and better aim and speed. One shot clipped the man on the shoulder and another took off the bottom half of his face. Dallin stepped over the gory body and eased open the door in a crouch. He peered to all points in the gloom of the interior before stepping quietly through it, pausing only briefly to reload. Both guns now in his hands, their familiar heft heartening and comfortable against his palms, he made his slow, careful way into the main room of the dilapidated little store.

  The volleys coming from the front were winding down to sporadic barrages. Dallin really didn’t fancy going down under friendly fire, so he kept low and quiet, inching his way around a rotting chemist’s bench until he could clearly see the backs of three men. All of them had their eyes and guns pointed out the gaps in the boarded windows facing the street. Two of them had taken up crouched positions at the west to cover the office and the hostel, which left one covering the livery. Waiting for the covering noise of another volley from the street, Dallin raised both guns and took one man on either side. One of them flew halfway through what was left of the boards on the window on impact; the other simply slumped and slithered to the floor. It took a moment for the man who was left to realize what happened, his gun blazing steadily until it clicked three times, the dull alert that he’d emptied his chambers, then he turned, huddled down on his haunches with his back to the wall to reload. Spotted Dallin.

  “Calm and slow, now,” Dallin said evenly. “Put it on the floor and lace your hands behind your head.”

  The man’s glance shot to either side of him, finally taking in the fates of his compatriots. Dallin watched him for a telltale shift of the jaw, saw it and launched himself across the room. He slammed the butt of his gun to the man’s temple before he had a chance to complete his suicide. It was going to be interesting, Dallin thought as he laid the man on his back on the floor, finding a way to prevent him from chewing the capsule from inside his cheek in a way that would still allow him to talk, but he wanted at least one of these men alive, damn it.

  He stood, well away from the openings in the windows, thinking how ridiculous it would be for him to get shot by one of the men at the hostel or livery now. Grimacing, he made his way over to the door, and cracked it open. “Hold your fire!” he called into the street. “All is secure here and I’m coming out.” He pushed the door the rest of the way slowly, spotted the barrels of two rifles pointing directly at him from the second story of the hostel and an archer on the roof. A moment of silence while he stood still, arms extended, and gave them whatever time they needed to recognize him, then one of the men called down from the hostel.

  “The Office!” he yelled. “Newell’s down and one of ‘em got through!”

  Dallin jerked his glance to his right. A crumpled form lay to the side of the porch, half-around the corner of the building. With a vile curse, he sprinted the distance, calling back over his shoulder to no one in particular for someone to secure the man still alive in the mercantile and for someone else to go for the healer right now. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he hoped she wouldn’t take as long as she had that night at the inn, which brought what might right now be happening at that inn to the front of his mind. He shoved it away, concentrated on getting across the street and giving Newell a quick once-over. Still alive, which was good, but bleeding foamy pink bubbles through a chest wound, which was bad. Dallin dragged him out fully on the ground, laid him flat on his back.

  One of the men was hauling arse down the street from the livery. Dallin put a finger to his lips, gestured silently for the man to do what he could for Newell, then crept up onto the porch. Carefully, he peered around the doorframe and into the office. Had to blink several times and shake his head before he could make his brain believe what his eyes were seeing.

  Locke’s body still lay where it had fallen, covered now with a blood-blotched sheet from Wil’s cot. Farther into the office, the trail of destruction—a broken and upended chair, the cast-iron kettle, shattered cro
ckery, papers everywhere, even a desk drawer—told at least half the tale. The rest of it was lying in a crumpled heap just in front of the cell where Dallin had been sleeping. The body was mostly intact and appearing unscathed, but from the neck up, Dallin wouldn’t have known it had once been a man.

  Wil crouched over him, bound right hand settled in a pool of spreading blood, left hand methodically beating at the pulp that was once the man’s skull with the butt of Locke’s gun. He was still shirtless and barefoot, still covered in Locke’s blood. He was weeping, bruised mouth pulled up at the corners in what could either be a gentle smile or a delicately malicious snarl. Tears cleaned stark tracks down his cheeks through Locke’s drying blood. The effect was something like an archaic, cannibalistic savage.

  Dallin had been a fool to think this man weak, for even a second. Unbalanced, almost surely, but there was something hard and cold inside him that didn’t allow weakness, and would bite and snap at any who mistook a momentary lapse for fragility. If Dallin had taken Wil up on any one of his desperate, tearful invitations yesterday or the night before, however sincere they’d been in the moment, he rather thought he’d’ve got his throat torn out for his trouble when that rabid survival instinct kicked back in again.

 

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