There were people on the street Tarc had been going to turn onto as well. He wasn’t sure they were Krait’s men, but he and Daussie hurried across that street anyway. The siblings trotted down to the next corner, trying to stay as quiet as they could. Once again there were people in the street to the right, the direction which went towards the tavern. Worse, Tarc could now tell that someone was coming down the street towards them from directly ahead. They had no choice but to turn left and travel away from the tavern.
At the next half-block, Tarc turned them into a narrow alley. Part way down it he realized with dismay that, although he’d checked the alley for people, he’d been using his ghost to search for bright spots of warmth indicating people on their feet.
Only about 20 feet away, there was a man lying down under a pile of leaves and debris! Tarc wondered if it was a drunk, but they were a long way from the bars and taverns. Besides, the man looked tense, not sprawled.
He had a sudden thought. Crouching down a respectable distance away he whispered, “Sgt. Garcia?”
In return he heard Garcia’s voice, “Young Hyllis?”
“Yes. Are you doing okay?”
“I guess. My wife and kids have had to scatter out to hide with different relatives. I’ve been trying to stay undercover and figure out something to do about these invaders… Unfortunately, I haven’t had any strokes of genius yet.”
“Capt. Pike says that it will be terribly demoralizing for them if some of them are killed each night,” Tarc paraphrased. It wasn’t exactly what the captain had said, but Tarc thought it was close enough. “He thought you might be able to kill some of them.”
Garcia snorted softly, “Easier said than done, unfortunately. Killing a man is hard.” After a pause, “The Captain’s still alive then?”
Tarc nodded, then realized again that Garcia probably would have a hard time seeing it. “Yes, he’s pretty sick though.”
“Who’s that with you?”
“My sister, Daussie.”
“Jesus, what’s she doing out here in town?”
To Tarc’s great amazement Daussie said, as if it were obvious, “Tarc needed help moving a couple of dead soldiers away from the stable on their horses. If they’d fallen off, he wouldn’t have been able to get them back on.”
“Dead soldiers?”
“Oh crap!” Tarc said. He had been focusing on the conversation instead of keeping his ghost spread as far as possible. A pair of soldiers were about to enter the alley. “Someone’s coming!”
“Where?” Garcia said, lifting his head. The two men came into view, “How did you know…”
“I heard something,” Tarc whispered. “Let’s get out of here!” Then he sagged, “Too late. Two more coming from the other end.”
“Move on a little towards that end,” Garcia whispered back, “when these two go past me, I’ll attack them from behind.”
“Okay.” He turned to Daussie, “Dauss, you hide in that doorway.” Tarc started slowly towards the far end of the alley. Two soldiers appeared there and started towards him. He hated the trapped sensation. Resisting the temptation to reach for his knife, he wondered if he could brazen it out. “Good evening,” he called.
“Patrol. Stop where you are. We’ve had the feeling you might be trying to avoid us. What are you doing out this time of night?”
Tarc didn’t have to pretend to be nervous. Voice trembling, he said, “Just going to talk to my uncle. Is there a problem?” He checked behind him to see what was going on with the two soldiers back there. With horror, he realized Daussie hadn’t hidden in the doorway like he’d told her. Instead she was standing right behind him. The other two soldiers were just passing Garcia’s position.
“Yeah, there’s a problem,” the soldier said, drawing his sword. “Get down on your knees.”
My knees? Tarc wondered why, but only for a second. He started to lower himself as if he was going to kneel, but at the same time raised his hands as if he were surrendering. At the last moment he reached back over his shoulder.
His arm flashed forward.
One knife on the way, he reached back for another.
The first soldier convulsed, flipping end over end as the knife blade shot into his brain through the thin bone in the back of the eye’s orbit and set off a massive seizure.
The second soldier simply slumped, quivering in his own death throes.
Tarc pulled out his working knife and spun towards the men behind him. Garcia was leaping onto the one farthest away.
Tarc threw his working knife at the closer one. The bigger knife was quite a bit harder to control, but Tarc had thrown it relatively well. He was able to make it strike the eye, though it went in near the upper part of the orbit. The point of the blade skipped inward off the harder rim of the orbit, down the semi-conical funnel of bone behind the eye and into the brain.
Garcia was struggling with the soldier he had attacked. Tarc had the impression that he had tried to stab the man in the back but had encountered mail. Now he had the man from behind, wrestling with him. He appeared to be trying to reach over and cut the man’s throat.
Tarc had thrown all the knives he had.
He was about to run to the soldier he’d just killed and retrieve his working knife when Daussie said, “Here.”
Tarc realized she was holding out the knife he’d given her earlier. He took the knife. He’d never thrown this one, but its balance felt fair.
Garcia and his opponent heaved at each other. A twist in their battle put Garcia behind the man from Tarc’s perspective. The man tried to stab his sword up over his shoulder at Garcia and Garcia ducked his head down.
Tarc threw Daussie’s knife.
It flew, curving slightly to follow the man’s head as he hunched against Garcia’s grip. That slight curve was about as much as Tarc could put on the heavy work knife, but it was enough.
As the knife lodged in the base of his brain, this man also convulsed. The explosive contraction twisted the man free from Garcia’s grip. For a moment Garcia looked panicked, but when the man flopped to the ground and lay there merely quivering Tarc could hear the breath sigh out of him.
Tarc bent and retrieved his working knife from the man in front of him. Giving it a quick wipe on the man’s clothes, he slipped it in his sheath and stepped to the one who’d been fighting Garcia.
Tarc looked up at Garcia who had been looking around, trying to figure out what had happened to their attackers. Tarc bent and jerked Daussie’s knife out of Garcia’s erstwhile opponent.
Tarc turned and walked toward Daussie. He handed her knife to her, whispering, “It’s still bloody. I didn’t get a chance to wipe it.”
“That’s okay,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Here’s your throwing knives. I cleaned them off.” She turned back to the two bodies, evidently intending to wipe her own knife off on one of them. Tarc bent over so the motion of putting his own knives away wouldn’t be visible to Garcia.
Standing back up, he walked back to where Garcia had turned his erstwhile opponent onto his back and stood staring at him, “What the hell just happened?” he asked, almost plaintively.
Tarc shrugged, though he wasn’t sure Garcia could see it. Looking with his real eyes, he saw that the man’s wound fell in the fold just above the eyeball and was hard to see in the dim light. It hadn’t bled much. “I don’t know, but we’d better get out of here before more of them show up.” He tugged at Garcia’s elbow, turning him towards the tavern. “Would you like to sleep in our cellar with Capt. Pike tonight?”
“Okay,” Garcia said, sounding stunned. He shambled alongside Tarc for a moment, then said, “I should be scouting ahead.”
Tarc said, “I’ll scout ahead; my hearing’s really good.” He glanced back and saw Daussie trotting silently up behind them as if there weren’t a thing in the world to worry about. “I’d appreciate it if you stayed back to protect Daussie.”
Garcia simply said, “Okay.” He waited a moment for Daussie.
Tarc shook his head and trotted ahead, casting his ghost out widely to be sure they weren’t about to be surprised again.
When they arrived back at the tavern, Tarc first led them to the stable where he made a show of going inside to be sure none of the soldiers were there. Once he had cleared it, Daussie swarmed up the ladder toward her hiding place. Tarc led Garcia over towards the tavern itself. His ghost already told him that the rest of the soldiers had left the main room and he almost led Garcia directly in. At the last moment he remembered and said, “Give me a second to make sure none of the soldiers are in the big room.”
Garcia nodded.
Tarc stepped inside the door, glanced around, then stepped back outside, “It’s clear, you can come in.”
Arriving in the cellar, Tarc moved the panel away from the hidden room. They found Eva crouched at Pike’s side. It didn’t smell very good in the small area. Pike was sweating and moaning. Tarc sent his ghost in to see what Eva was doing. He found a collection of thick liquid in the wall of Pike’s abdomen where he’d been wounded. The tissue around it was very hot and swollen. He watched Eva snipping out some of the sutures she had put in that first night. Some were already gone, suggesting that that’s what she’d been working on before they got there.
Eva glanced up and nodded at them, “Hello Sergeant, Tarc. The captain has developed an abscess and I’m about to drain it. It’ll probably smell pretty bad, so you might want to go back upstairs for a bit.” She eyed Tarc, “On the other hand Tarc, if you’re going to be a healer, you’ll need to learn how to be around these kinds of smells.”
Garcia said, “I visited a battlefield hospital once. I know infections can smell pretty awful, but I was able to stand it then.”
“Okay, we’ll probably need somebody to hold the captain still anyway. If you’d sit by his head; you can do that.” She turned to Tarc, “Push that bowl over here to catch the pus when it comes out.”
Eva wiped down Pike’s wound with cotton balls soaked in moonshine then deftly stuck the point of her scissors right into the depths of the wound and spread the blades apart.
Pike rose up with a shriek. Garcia had been ready and quickly got a grip on his upper body, murmuring in his ear as he tried to calm him. Blood and pus poured out of the wound. Momentarily, Tarc feared that the huge quantity of blood indicated his mother had stabbed the scissors into a great vessel. Almost immediately, however, he recognized that his mother’s ghost had told her exactly where to put the scissors’ tips.
Before Tarc could give that much thought though, a horrid stench filled the air. Tarc’s eyes widened as the smell became so unbelievably disgusting that he thought surely he would retch.
Garcia had turned his head to the side to bury it in the collar of his shirt. Sweat beaded his forehead.
Tarc looked around desperately for something to throw up into. He had just about decided he would have to run up the stairs and throw up outside when his mother calmly said, “Tarc? Can you pour some of that bottle of sterile saltwater in the wound here? We need to wash this out.” She glanced at Garcia, “Sergeant, if you could turn him up on his side a little bit, that would help.”
Tarc found that having something to do helped him repress his reaction to the foul smell. He picked up one of the bottles and opened it. As he made to pour it in, his mother looked up at him and said, “So, we want to slosh this around in there to wash out as much of the pus as we can.” She raised an eyebrow at him to make sure he understood she was talking about sloshing the saline around with his talent.
As Tarc poured the saline into the opening he used his ghost to swirl it around in the cavity. Then Eva had Garcia roll the captain the other way to let the fluid drain out. They repeated this maneuver several times, then Eva folded some of her sterilized cloth up against the wound and put a wrap around Pike’s waist to hold it in place.
Tarc frowned, “Aren’t you going to suture the wound back up?”
“Oh no! You suture wounds closed initially to try to keep germs from getting in. But once an infection is established, you leave wounds open so the pus can drain out. Trapping pus inside makes you really sick like the captain is now.”
Garcia said that he would stay with the captain that night, though Tarc couldn’t believe anyone would be willing to stay down there in that stench. As they climbed the stairs, Tarc quietly asked Eva, “Does the Captain have any chance?”
Eva shrugged her shoulders grimly, “I expect you’re wondering whether he’ll live. It doesn’t look good, but sometimes you’re surprised. We’ll just have to see.”
At the top of the stairs they ran into Daum, “Tarc! Where have you been? I’ve been in a panic looking for you. I can’t find Daussie either!”
Tarc made little calming motions with his hands. “Sorry, we made hidey hole for Daussie in the back of the stack of hay bales. She’s probably in there.”
Daum gave a large sigh of relief, “But where have you been?”
“Um, I saw a couple of soldiers going out to the stable and followed them because I had a bad feeling about what they might be doing out there…” Tarc paused, uncomfortable about the story he was about to tell.
“And…?” Daum said.
“Well they were just going to assignments on the night watch, but they ran into Daussie, and she forgot to limp, and then they… figured out who she was.”
“Oh my God…” gasped Eva. “What did they do?”
“Well… they were going to…” he swallowed, “you know.” He shrugged, “So I killed them.”
“What?!” Eva’s hand flew to her face as she glanced in shock at Daum. She turned slowly back to Tarc, “How?”
Tarc also looked at his father who held his hands up for a pause. To Tarc he said “I hadn’t told her yet.” He turned to Eva, “Tarc can guide a thrown knife with his ghost… He’s… impossibly accurate. If it wasn’t for him we’d have been killed several times that first night.”
Eva turned to stare at Tarc with wide eyes.
He wasn’t sure whether she looked amazed, or horrified. She was a healer, so he thought probably—horrified. He looked down at his shoes and whispered, “Sorry.”
Eva stepped to him, and put her arms around him for a tight hug. “Don’t be sorry. It’s true, I don’t think healers should hurt people… but, if you hadn’t, everyone in my family, including my son, would be dead.”
Concern in his eyes, Daum said, “How’s Daussie taking it? She must’ve been pretty traumatized.”
“Oh, yes!” Eva said. “I’d better go talk to her.”
Tarc said, “Well, that’s the strangest thing. You know how she’s always been afraid of things? And I’m not just talking as the big brother who used to tease her. I mean, she had a horrible time during that day in the square. But, she’s been really different after… after I killed those two guys. Instead of freaking out, or screaming, she helped me load them on their horses so we could take them out into town.” He shrugged, “We didn’t want them being found dead here at the tavern.” He looked up at his gaping parents, and shrugged again, “So that’s where we’ve been.”
His parents simply stared at him for another moment or two. Then Daum snorted and said, “Yeah,” he glanced at Eva and rolled his eyes, “It’s Daussie’s behavior that’s really astonishing, isn’t it?”
Before anyone said anything more, Sgt. Garcia appeared at the top of the cellar stairs. “Oh, there you are. I’ve been worrying. You know how those four soldiers died there in the alley with us?” He shrugged, “Though what the hell killed them, I have no idea!” He looked at Tarc curiously, “I’ve been wondering if maybe someone shot them with poison darts or something, but where that person would have been hiding I don’t know.”
Tarc shrugged.
Garcia’s eyes turned to Daum, “Anyway, I’ve been wondering how Krait might react. After what I heard he did that first day in the square, I’m worried that he might kill a bunch of townspeople to ‘teach us a lesson.’”
Tarc’s gut spasmed at the thought. He looked questioningly at his father.
Daum looked grim. After a moment he nodded, “Sounds exactly like how that son of a bitch would react.”
“What are we going to do?!” Garcia asked.
Tarc felt stunned. Garcia was the military man! Shouldn’t he be telling them what to do?
Daum said, “Did you ask Capt. Pike if he had any ideas?”
Garcia snorted, “I would, but he’s completely delirious.”
Daum turned to Eva, a question on his face. She shrugged and said, “He had a gut wound. He probably won’t make it, though I still think there’s some small chance.”
“You don’t have anything that would clear his head briefly to let him give us some advice?”
She slowly shook her head.
Garcia said slowly, “I had one idea…” he paused, eyeing Daum. “It’s kind of crazy though.”
Daum lifted his chin interrogatively.
“I was thinkin’ about some of those amazing shots you made with your bow last night,” he said slowly. “The Tornesson’s have a house with an upstairs window that looks out over the square. I’ll bet they assemble everyone on the square again if they decide to kill some folks. What if you were hiding behind that window?”
Daum looked appalled. “You’re thinking I could assassinate Krait from up there?!”
Garcia nodded, “If he dropped dead at the front of the square, I’ll bet the townspeople might rally to attack the rest of them.”
Tarc said, “It’s pretty hard to attack when they have swords and you don’t even have a knife.”
“But they’d be outnumbered by a huge margin!”
Daum shook his head, “You still have to have someone to lead the charge, and that leader will almost certainly get killed. I don’t know anyone brave enough to do that. Do you?” He shook his head, “Besides, I was incredibly lucky last night,” he said glancing at Tarc. “And, you’re talking about a really long shot.”
Hyllis Family Story 1: Telekinetic Page 21