Oath of Swords-ARC

by David Weber

  Their whispers chopped off with knife-sharp suddenness as the armed and armored trio appeared. The servants exchanged furtive, frightened glances, then one of them reached for his broom while the other cleared his throat, picked up a heavy tray of dirty tankards, and started to sidle out.

  "Not so fast, my lad," a deep voice rumbled, and a tree-trunk arm blocked his way. Bahzell smiled, and the servant froze and licked his lips.

  "M-M-M'lord?" he quavered.

  "It's a word with your master I want. Where might I be finding him?"

  "I-I'm sure I w-wouldn't know, M'lord."

  "Wouldn't you, now?" Bahzell watched the man's shoulders tighten. "I'd not like to think you a liar, so just you give me your best guess, and it's grateful I'll be."

  The servant swallowed and darted an agonized look of appeal over his shoulder, but his fellow was busy sweeping up sawdust—a task which obviously occupied him to the exclusion of all else.

  The man with the tray looked back up at Bahzell. The hradani made no threatening gestures, but his eyes were cold, and someone his size required no theatrics. The servant swallowed again, then slumped.

  "I-In the kitchen, M'lord."

  "There, now. You did have a notion, didn't you? And it's grateful I am." Bahzell looked at Brandark. "Brandark, my lad, why don't you find a seat and keep these fine fellows company for a bit."

  "Certainly." The Bloody Sword bowed to the servants and settled into a chair just inside the doorway.

  "Don't be long," he called after his departing friends. "I left my balalaika upstairs, and I can't entertain properly without it."

  The Brown Horse's kitchens were none too clean, and Bahzell's nose wrinkled at the smell of rancid grease and over-ripe garbage as he thrust the swinging door open.

  The landlord was in the middle of the kitchen, talking excitedly to another servant. This one was just fastening his cloak when Bahzell and Tothas entered, and he and his master froze like rabbits.

  The Horse Stealer hooked his thumbs in his belt and rocked gently, his smile almost genial, and the landlord's face twitched.

  "Ah, that will be all, Lamach," he said, and the servant started for a rear door, only to freeze again as Bahzell cleared his throat. He looked back over his shoulder, and the hradani cocked his head at him.

  "Now don't you run off on our account, Lamach. You'd be after making me think you don't like us."

  He crooked a beckoning finger, and Lamach swallowed, but his feet moved as if against his will, carrying him back to the towering hradani.

  "That's a good lad!" Bahzell looked at Tothas. "Why don't you take Lamach outside there, Tothas? It's only a word or two I need with his master, and if the two of you see to it we're bothered by naught, why, Lamach can be on his way as soon as we've done. Unless, of course, there's some reason his master should be reconsidering his errand."

  Tothas nodded curtly and waved Lamach out into the hall. The doors swung shut, and Bahzell turned back to the pudgy, white-faced, sweating landlord, and folded his arms across his massive chest.

  "Now don't you worry, friend," he soothed. "I've no doubt you've been told all manner of tales about my folk, and dreadful they must have been, but you've my word they weren't true. Why, we're almost as civilized as your own folk these days, and as one civilized man to another, I'd not harm a hair on your head. Still," his voice stayed just as soothing, but his eyes glittered, "I'm bound to admit there are things can cause any of us to backslide a mite. Like lies. Why, I've seen one of my folk rip both a man's arms off for a lie. Dreadful sorry he was for it afterward, but—"

  He shrugged, and the landlord whimpered. Bahzell let him sweat for a long, frightened minute, then went on in a harder voice.

  "It's in my mind you know more about this than you're wishful to admit, friend."

  "N-N-No!" the landlord gasped.

  "Ah!" Bahzell cocked his ears. "Was that a lie I heard?" He unfolded his arms, and the landlord flinched in terror, but the hradani merely scratched his chin thoughtfully. "No," he said after a moment, "no, it's certain I am you'd not lie, but you'd best speak more clearly, friend. For a moment there I was thinking you'd said 'No'."

  "I-I-I—" the pudgy man stuttered, and Bahzell frowned.

  "Look you here, now," he said in a sterner voice. "You were after pissing yourself even before Brandark fetched you upstairs this morning. You knew something was wrong—aye, and you'd more than a suspicion what, too, I'm thinking—before ever that door went down. Come to that, I can't but wonder just where you were sending Lamach in such a hurry. It's enough to make a man think you meant to warn someone I might be hunting him. Now, I'm naught but a hradani, but to my mind a man as knows what's happened to my friends and won't tell me, he's not so good a friend to me. And if he's not my friend, well—"

  He shrugged, and the landlord sank to his knees on the greasy floor, round belly shaking like pudding, and clasped his hands before him.

  "Please!" he whispered. "Oh, please! I-I don't know anything—truly I don't! A-And if I were . . . were to say anything that wasn't true, or . . . or if I don't tell him you're . . . you're asking questions—"

  His voice broke piteously, but Bahzell only gazed down with flinty eyes, and something inside the landlord shriveled under their dreadful promise.

  "There's a lass half-dead upstairs," Bahzell said softly. "A good lass—not perfect, maybe, but a good person. If it should happen you'd aught to do with that, I just might take it into my head to carve out your liver and fry it in front of you." The Horse Stealer's voice was infinitely more terrifying for its matter-of-fact sincerity, and the innkeeper shuddered.

  "That's bad enough, I'm thinking," the hradani went on, "but there's worse, for Lady Zarantha isn't upstairs. Now, it's possible she's dead, but there's no way I can know until I find her, and find her I will, one way or another. Alive or dead, I will find her, and if it should happen when I do that I'm after learning you did know something and kept it from me, or warned those as have her I was coming, I'll be back." The landlord looked up in dull terror, and Bahzell bared his teeth and spoke very, very softly.

  "You'd best be remembering every tale you ever heard about my folk, friend, because this I promise you. If Lady Zarantha dies and you've kept aught back from me, you'll wish you'd died with her—however it was—before you do."

  "—so that's the whole of it, so far as he knows," Bahzell told his friends grimly. The healer was still upstairs with Rekah, and they sat before the cold taproom hearth while he spoke quietly. "Mind, it's not so certain I am he's told me all he knows, but I'm thinking what he has said is true enough."

  "Yes, and it makes sense, too," Brandark muttered. The Bloody Sword's dagger glittered as he carved patterns in the tabletop, and his ears were half-flattened. "Gods! No wonder the poor bastard's scared to death. Black wizards less than a league away, and he can't even tell the authorities because one of them is the authorities!"

  Tothas nodded, wasted face shocked, for despite all that had happened since he first set out for Axe Hollow with Zarantha, the possibility that wizards had infiltrated the Empire had been only a suspicion before.

  "Aye, well, I was listening hard to all he said," Bahzell said, "and I'm thinking Baron Dunsahnta himself's not so powerful a wizard as all that."

  "But the landlord claims he's their leader!" Tothas objected.

  "So he does, but think. The baron's magistrate and landlord in one. That's making him king frog in a tiny pond; if you were after being one of the tadpoles in his puddle, wouldn't you think he had to be the one in charge?"

  The Spearman nodded after a moment, and Bahzell shrugged.

  "Well, then, think on this. It's death to dabble in black sorcery and blood magic, so if you were after being a black wizard and you were wishful to move into an area, who would you look to recruit first of all?"

  "The most powerful noble in it," Tothas said flatly. "Aye, they'd almost have to bring him in on their side—or kill him and put one of their own in his plac
e."

  "So they would. And I'm wondering about something else, as well. If magi can sense black wizards, can a wizard sense a mage?"

  Tothas screwed his forehead up in thought, then shook his head.

  "No. Oh, they can sense the mage talent, if it's strong enough, but only if it's used, and—"

  "And she was probably using it," Brandark said grimly. Tothas frowned at him, and the Bloody Sword's ears twitched. "Think, man. You say she can 'confuse the eye' into not noticing her, and she was pretending to be Rekah's maid. Don't you think she'd have been reinforcing that any way she could?"

  Tothas drew a deep breath and nodded unwillingly.

  "That was in my own mind," Bahzell murmured. He drummed on the table for a long, silent moment while Brandark carved a fresh design, then glanced sideways at Tothas. "You were saying something this morning—something about their taking her 'home' to kill." Tothas nodded, and Bahzell frowned. "How sure would you be of that? And why would they do it?"

  "I can't be positive, but if they know who she is, not just what, it's what they'll do. Oh, they'll kill her out of hand sooner than let her go, but if they can get her home and kill her on her own ground, they will."

  "Why?" Bahzell repeated.

  "Because she's heir to Jash,n," the armsman said, as if that explained everything.

  "And?" Brandark asked, and sighed at Tothas' look of disbelief. "Tothas, what our people remember about wizards is how to kill them, not how they do whatever they do, and we didn't spend years in Axe Hallow learning about them."

  "Oh." The Spearman digested that for a moment, then shrugged. "Well, it has to do with the nature of blood magic. Mind you, My Lady knows far more about it than I do, but from what I've been told, no wizard produces his own power. Mage talent draws on the power of the mage's own mind, but a wizard uses the energy that—well, that holds everything together, if you see what I mean."

  Both hradani looked blank, and he sighed.

  "The magi say there's power in everything, even a rock, but especially in living things. The white wizards—when there were any—were sworn never to use the energy of living things, especially people, unless someone chose to let them, and even then they were bound never to kill or injure the . . . the donor. Are you with me so far?"

  "Yessssss," Brandark said slowly. "Or I think I am, anyway."

  "All right, then. The trouble is, very few wizards can use the energy of unliving things without years of study. It's harder to work with for some reason. But life energy, now, that's easy to work with, especially at the moment of death. When a living thing dies, its energy—its life force—flows back out to merge with all the energy about it, and if a wizard seizes it when it does, he can use it however he wants. That's why blood wizards seem so powerful. They may actually be weak—compared to other wizards, anyway—but they have a stronger energy source to work with, you see."

  Both hradani nodded this time, and Tothas leaned over the table.

  "Remember I got all this in bits and pieces, so I may have some of it wrong, but from what I understand, the more intelligent a creature, the greater its energy. That's why the most powerful blood rituals use people, not animals. And, by the same token, a younger person has more energy than someone who's old and closer to death . . . and a mage has more than almost anyone else."

  Bahzell's mouth tightened, and Tothas nodded.

  "But that's not all," he said more harshly, no longer discussing theory but returning to the mistress he loved. "Some people, well, they 'resonate' with the life force around them."

  "'Resonate?'" Brandark repeated carefully, and Tothas nodded again.

  "That's the word Master Kreska used the one time he discussed it with me. You see, when someone follows another person, then a tiny bit of his energy is tied up with that person's. It's . . . well, it's like a burning glass. Whenever you give allegiance to someone, that person is a focus for you, almost a part of you, and if you give allegiance willingly—because you trust or love them, not just because you must—the bond is stronger. D'you follow?"

  Brandark and Bahzell nodded dubiously, and Tothas sighed.

  "Well, when you're a ruler—or a ruler's heir—you're the focus of a great many people's energy. And when you're a ruler like Duke Jash,n—or Lady Zarantha—most of those people love and trust you. So if they can get her back onto Jash,n land, back into range of all that energy, and then kill her—"

  He broke off, biting his lip, and Bahzell squeezed his shoulder.

  "All right," the Horse Stealer said quietly. "From what you've said, I'm thinking you're right. She's alive so far, and they'll be looking for a way to get her home, and that means we've still time to find her first."

  "Where do we start?" Brandark asked.

  "Well, as to that, I'm minded to pay a little call on the baron," Bahzell rumbled. "I've fair pumped that landlord dry, and from all he's said, Dunsahnta can't have above two score armsmen, and his 'keep's' scarce more than a fortified manor house. Now wouldn't it be a strange thing if such as we couldn't get into a place like that if it so happened we'd a mind to?"

  Neither of his companions seemed to find anything to object to in that statement, and he smiled.

  "Now, it may be we'll find Lady Zarantha clapped up in there somewhere, but, truth to tell, I'm thinking they'll have started her off to the South Weald as soon as ever they could. They've no way to know what we'll do, so they'll try to get her home quick enough to outrun anything we might do."

  Tothas nodded unhappily, but Bahzell squeezed his shoulder again.

  "Buck up, man. Unless they've some magical beastie to use for it, they've no choice but to move her by horse, wagon, or afoot. Just let me sniff out the way they've gone, and I'll run them to ground before they make it." Brandark nodded sharply, endorsing the Horse Stealer's promise, and Bahzell's eyes gleamed at Zarantha's armsman.

  "And, d'you know, Tothas, if I can but have a word with this Baron Dunsahnta—aye, or with one or two of his guardsmen—I'll know exactly where to look for her."

  Chapter Twenty-three

  A nail-paring moon floated in racing cloud wrack as Brandark and Tothas swung down from their horses under the leafless trees. Bahzell tied Zarantha's mule to a branch and stood looking out from the woods at their objective, then turned his head as the other two stepped up beside him.

  "You were right—it isn't much of a keep," Brandark murmured.

  Bahzell grunted and returned his attention to Baron Dunsahnta's home. Dunsahnta had never been a rich holding, despite its position on the main road north. The current baron's father had won his title for service in the Spearman army that pushed the Empire's borders up to the Blackwater River, but he'd never had the money to build a proper seat for his barony. Instead, he'd taken over the single fortified manor in the area and expanded it. In fairness to him, his military instincts had been sound, and his "keep" would have been a much nastier proposition if his son had maintained it properly.

  The first baron had laid out an extended perimeter of earthen ramparts with angled bastions to let archers sweep the wall between them, and a deep ditch had been dug at the foot of the wall. He'd clearly never intended to hold that much wall solely with his own retainers; he'd built it to cover the entire population of Dunsahnta Village and all of his other subjects in time of war, and he would have expected them to help man the defenses.

  His son, however, had let the earthworks crumble. Parts of them had eroded and slipped down into the ditch at their foot, providing breaches and bridges in one, and no one had brushed back the approaches in years. Some of the saplings out there were taller than Bahzell, and what should have been a clear killing zone for archery was waist high in undergrowth. It seemed the current baron had more important charges on his purse than sheltering his people against attack.

  Still, he hadn't totally neglected his security. The inner stone wall about the manor house proper was high enough, and sound, and Bahzell's night vision made out two guards at the main gate. Lanterns gle
amed at the wall's corners, as well. He couldn't be certain whether there were any guards up there, though it seemed likely. But there was a smaller gate—not quite a sally port, but something similar—in an angle of the wall. It was drenched in shadow, hidden from anyone who might be standing atop the wall, and even his eyes saw no guard anywhere near it.

  "There," he said finally, pointing at the side gate.

  "There?" Tothas sounded doubtful. "That's a long way to go without being spotted, and you don't really expect it to be unlocked, do you?"

  "I can't know till I've looked, now can I? And as for 'a long way to go'—" Bahzell snorted. "I've crossed barer ground than yon against Sothoii sentries, Tothas! Against these lads, and with all that lovely brush, it's after being no challenge at all, at all."