by Widowmaker
Could it…?
But it was as if the fire was throwing less heat than it had done until now, and the cold of the great cut stones was leaching out of the fortress walls and into the room.
He glanced at the others to see if they had felt or noticed anything amiss, and saw nothing. Eskra and Gemmel, their brief flash of difference forgotten or at least set aside, were in the middle of some convoluted anecdote about a man and a weighted barrel:
“‘…then,’ said he, ‘since I had forgotten to let go of the rope, I went up again. And halfway up, I met the barrel coming down…’ ”
For all that it was no more than a funny story, Bayrd had a nasty feeling that when all the layers of the story were peeled away, the man at the end of the rope – and the butt of the joke – would be himself.
Gemmel ar’Ekren had long since gone to his bed in the guest-quarters of the north tower, and the musicians and other servants had been dismissed; but Bayrd and Eskra still sat in the shadowy warmth of the retiring-room, together and yet alone with whatever thoughts might fill their minds.
For all his determination to get thoroughly drunk, Bayrd had fallen far short of the goal. It was difficult to drink constantly when what he wanted to do was talk, and where Gemmel was concerned, talking was the thing to do.
The man was an elegant and entertaining storyteller, with a fund of anecdotes involving family, friends, rivals, enemies and even family pets, and it was obvious within the first half-hour that he was deliberately using that talent. To repay the Lord Talvalin’s hospitality, perhaps, as he might have sung for his supper. But it seemed much more likely that he was covering the unpleasantness he’d witnessed with a veneer of amusing memories. It was just a veneer, nothing more; but it had been enough, tonight at least, to blunt the sharpness of the hurt.
And yet it was the sheer unreason of it all that made the edges so very keen. Bayrd stared at the crumbling embers in the fireplace and realized that it was the wrong approach to take. Thinking with the heart, not with the head. Just remember, it’s always the head that they cut off.
Very well then, set aside the friendship. Be cool, be political, be the clan-lord who has successfully balanced the two most powerful factions in Alba for the past six months, and so far as both sides are concerned is still perfumed with the scent of roses.
So then: why so sudden? Why no warning? Why no intimation that one’s right hand was considering rebellion?
That was the true purpose of a Bannerman and a Companion: to be the right hand of his clan-lord. The man who was his lord’s conscience, and the guardian of his honour. And the kailin who, for the sake of that lord’s honour, would set aside his own honour and do those deeds that the lord dared not.
Except that Marc had refused, in a backhanded sort of way, to do any such thing.
There had been the merest, briefest suggestion that Kalarr cu Ruruc’s death would be a benefit to all, and with that, the unstated implication that Marc should cause it. He had not said ‘yes’, and he had not said ‘no’; but he had said, ‘only if it will not affect my honour’, knowing full well that because it would, Bayrd would not give him the order.
Honour. That was always the stumbling-block.
It was the same with Gerin ar’Diskan. Bayrd had fought his father in a formal duel, for some reason he could no longer remember, but to fight the son as well would smack too much of bounty-hunting. The only acceptable alternative, to declare clan-war, would merely be a suicide more protracted than the use of a tsepan, since Clan ar’Diskan’s warriors outmatched those of clan Talvalin by a factor of four to one – and that was even before their respective allies were taken into consideration. Even so, Bayrd was growing cynical enough to believe that this might been another attempt to manipulate his actions, as had happened with the reavers. But he wasn’t going to be drawn into something like that again.
Otherwise this would have been the perfect time to start a small war. The land was without the strong hand of an Overlord, and the two candidates for the position seemed more concerned with destroying one another than with the ultimate responsibility of bringing peace through stable rule. Even without Gemmel’s accidental – if it had been accidental – slip of the tongue, these days were becoming uncomfortably close to the old Time of Troubles, the Age of the Country at War. Especially since there were other enmities among the Albans, far older than the infant hatred between Talvalin and ar’Diskan.
There were Clans and Houses and Families whose hatreds were so ancient that they would think nothing of defeat, if only they could be assured of dragging their enemies down with them. Obliteration was a sweet thing to embrace on the way to the darkness, if it included one’s dearest enemy.
It was small wonder that the Cernueks and the Pryteneks and the Elthaneks looked on in amusement as their erstwhile conquerors faced each other down like duellists. They had all fought enough for decency, and then just as decently laid down their arms. For a people not carrying the leaden weight of the Alban Honour-Codes, life in respected defeat was far sweeter than any amount of honourable death.
And still none of it explained what bug of madness might have bitten Marc ar’Dru.
But the more that heavy satin silence of near midnight hung about them, the more he began to suspect that Eskra knew. Or could guess, from the depths of her wisdom in the Art. Cu Ruruc and ar’Diskan might both have gained from what Marc ar’Dru had said tonight, but Bayrd had not forgotten – and might never forget – the strange compulsion that had spoken so persuasively in his head as he stared at the shattered lens of Vanek ar’Kelayr’s eye.
What was it the players said? ‘The world is fracted and corroborate’: shattered all apart and then renewed. But those broken pieces might not have been put back together in their original shape. Just a shape, which wasn’t the same thing at all.
Bayrd had long learnt that there were many pleasures about marriage besides the obvious; and one of those was that a husband and a wife could, after some years, almost hear one another think. With Eskra it probably came easily enough, what with the Art Magic and the sorcery and all the rest. But for Bayrd, when it happened it was something worth attending to. And it was happening now.
She was ashamed of something.
Not the children; it was only the circumstances of the past two weeks that had kept Harel and her little sister Marla so much in the background. Not the wine; that was more a long-running joke between them than any real criticism.
But the more Bayrd tried to think of something innocuous, the more his mind kept veering back to what he was certain that it really was. Something that gave the lie to all his nurtured theories, made his enemies innocent – at least of one offence – and reminded him of what Eskra had been before they married. What she still was. What she could do and whom she could influence, far more easily than Kalarr.
Marc.
And he didn’t know how to be sure if he was right or wrong in his suspicions – except to ask directly, and risk a loss of peace far worse than any war.
Bayrd spent a long time sitting hunched beside an iron rack of hot stones in the citadel’s bath-house, as if some of what was troubling him might melt away in the steamy heat. It didn’t. Afterwards he lay sleepless and swathed in towels far into the short summer night, wondering how a man could ask his wife if she had somehow engineered the betrayal of a dear friend’s trust; and if the response was ‘yes’, then the obvious question had to be ‘why…?’
In the end, it always came down to why.
He could sense that Eskra was awake as well. She was beside him, but as far from his side as their great bed allowed, and the barrier of mistrust lying between them was like the naked sword of the old story. She knew something was wrong. And perhaps she knew exactly what was wrong.
That didn’t make matters any easier.
This was a stupid situation to be in; a situation where the right word might be the first step toward sorting matters out. And yet to say any word at all, and discover it t
o be the wrong one, might also be the first step towards escalating this already-awkward issue into the first major – and probably worst ever – quarrel of their married life.
Bayrd Talvalin smiled grimly to himself in the silver and black of the moonshot darkness. Alba, the land on which his people had set their claim for less than ten years, was already simmering on the edge of civil war, and he was worrying about a domestic dispute. Granted, it was somewhat different to the norm, but even so… His smile grew wider, if no more humorous.
Then it froze on his face as he abruptly and completely became wide awake.
Eskra had not moved, and from the rhythm of her breathing she had drifted at last into an uneasy slumber. But asleep or awake, she was certainly not the cause of the small metallic sound he had just heard.
It was one of those noises that need to be heard in the wrong place or at the wrong time, and when they are, they act as an immediate focus for all the senses. The rasp of a sword unsheathing right behind you; a twig snapping underfoot somewhere in the undergrowth; the protracted creak of a floorboard in a supposedly-empty house.
And the tiny scrape in the silence of three hours past midnight as someone softly and stealthily tries the latch of your bedroom door.
The servants knocked and waited for permission. The children did neither, but were noisy about it. But thieves – or assassins – would be very far from noisy. They would sound just like this. And in the present political climate Bayrd knew which of the two was more likely. He rolled sideways out of bed and reached for a robe, found nothing, and wrapped one of the scattered towels tightly around his waist instead.
It wasn’t such a foolish gesture of modesty as it seemed. There was something frightening beyond all proportion to the threat about meeting a possible armed assailant in nothing but bare skin. It went beyond mere nakedness and into a horrible sense of vulnerability. But it was also a feeling that was easy to neutralize. That length of cloth around the hips helped a little.
And the cool weight of a sword in each hand helped a lot.
Unlike his robe, the taiken and taipan had been in their proper place, secured by their respective belts to the weapon-rack by the head of the bed. For all that the shortsword’s locking collar had a tendency to stick in the throat of the scabbard, tonight its curve of blade came out smoothly, with only that momentary catch-and-scrape that no amount of oiling or polishing had ever managed to cure.
And Isileth…
Isileth Widowmaker slipped from her black battle scabbard with a sound like a steely intake of breath and an ease that was almost eager.
There was just enough moonlight for Bayrd to catch the shift of shadows as the door’s latch lifted again. That second attempt had no more success than the first, because – wanting to keep a prospective squabble between their lord and his wife at least one door’s thickness from the servants – he had dropped the inner bar.
Of all the bolts and locks meant to keep intruders out, that one was the least significant. It was no more than another latch, though one without a handle connecting to the outside. It rattled as the door was tested, a tiny noise, but one which brought Bayrd’s eyebrows together in a frown at the strength needed to shift one of his citadel’s ponderous oak doors in its frame.
Then he saw the blade, or at least the moonlight reflecting from its surface. A thin, flexible strip of steel eased between the edge of the door and its jamb, and began questing up and down for the obstruction. It would never move a horizontally sliding bolt, but if it came up beneath the inner latch…
As Bayrd realized what was happening, and cursed himself for not doing making the move far earlier, he discarded stealth for speed and threw himself into a shoulder-rolling dive across the corner of the bed in an attempt to slam one of the three main bolts into place.
And even then he wasn’t quick enough.
Both latches snapped up together and the door burst open, spilling armed men into the room. How many, he didn’t know for sure. They were hard to count and even hard to see, because all of them were dressed and hooded in the same charcoal grey, the very colour of shadows in moonlight. Quick as moths they flitted out of the frame of the open doorway and into the shadows where they belonged.
Talathen, said a voice in Bayrd’s mind. Shadowthieves. From Drosul. But how? By whose command? And why?
It wasn’t assassination, or he’d be dead by now. A kailin on the bloody business of feud might have met him honourably, sword to sword, but where these mercenaries were concerned, the Honour-Codes only got in the way of completing whatever task they’d been hired for. They’d have opened the door all right, but the only thing to come through it would have been arrows or poison-tipped darts. Then if they didn’t want his life, what did they want?
Events had already happened so fast that Eskra was still no more than drowsily aware of them. But she was shocked out of sleep by grey-gloved hands dragging her across the bed, and her scream answered Bayrd’s silent question plainly enough. They wanted hostages. And that meant there would be others.
After his children.
Somebody, somewhere, was playing the Great Game, and had stepped it up by several levels of intensity. The surge of anger that came boiling up inside his eyes turned the moonlight scarlet and the shadows to a flaring incandescent purple. Images moved against the eerie blaze of unlight. Five of them were grey; one was pale and struggling against the rest.
Whether it was rage, or outrage – or even sorcery – that had come to his aid, Bayrd Talvalin didn’t know or care. But he was no longer blind in the darkness, and that was the only thing that mattered.
He dropped his shortsword, and even before it clattered against the floor, both his hands were on Widowmaker’s hilt. When he moved, it was as if the taiken was dragging his hands and arms in its wake rather than being propelled by them. In either case, the final result was the same.
The blow, delivered from upper high guard, was called tarann’ach, the ‘striking thunderbolt’. It was a full-force focused cut downward into the angle of collarbone and neck, meant to defeat the great shoulderplates of Alban battle harness. Despite his sinister grey mask and clothing, the shadowy figure under the long straight blade wore no armour at all.
And for Isileth Widowmaker, mere flesh had never been an obstacle.
The longsword’s point rang against the wall and a fluttering spray of sparks marked where the metal gouged the stone. There was no such trace to show where it had also sheared through meat and bone. For a moment there was no apparent change in the grey silhouettes clustering around the bed. Then one of them sagged, slithering forward and sideways both at once in a way that should have been impossible.
The man fell apart.
The Shadowthief’s torso had been severed diagonally from shoulder to opposite hip, through ribs and spine and breastbone and all of the soft inner organs they contained. He hit the floor in two separate pieces, and spilled out a ghastly mess that glistened in the moonlight.
Then Eskra managed to wrench one hand free of her captors, and a second later Bayrd heard an appalling bang. It was a sound sharp as the clapping of hands, but magnified a thousand-fold so that the windows rattled and his ears rang from the concussion, and another of the talathen staggered away from the bed.
At least his body did.
For an instant there had been a nimbus of emerald-green fire surrounding the man’s head. In that light Bayrd had seen – and wished he hadn’t – the grey hood distend explosively as something atrocious happened to the skull it covered. Now it dangled down between his shoulderblades, a limp sack with nothing solid left inside it.
Bayrd was grateful that the corpse fell to lie on its back with the sagging horror underneath. For all its speed, that had been an ugly way to die. He was grimly accustomed to the destruction wrought by edged weapons, but this was different. It was a shocking enough sight that his red rage began to cool. His eyes began to darken again, and the night crept back across the glare that filled the room and l
et him see the talathen.
Until Eskra snapped a word of power and there was a sharp crackling noise. All of the oil-lamps in the room ignited at once, and there were no longer any shadows for the Shadowthieves to hide in.
Bayrd could hear a short, vicious rattle of words from one of the three surviving talathen. He had guessed right. The language was Droselan. None of them had drawn any weapon so far, and the snarled command was a reminder not to do so even now. It made him more and more certain that their purpose here was the taking of captives, not lives. Definitely a move in the Game, though not an honourable or especially acceptable one. But had their employer forgotten to warn them about the consequences of breaking into any kailin’s room after dark, never mind that of a clan-lord?
Or had the omission been deliberate? That, too, might be perceived as an acceptable move.
“Halt!” he shouted in the parade-ground bellow he hadn’t needed to use for a long time. “Teyy’aj hah! Kagh telej-hu, taü’ura!” The Droselan words came back with surprising ease, but then it was a language where orders and the imperative mode seemed more common than the softer forms of speech. “Drop all your weapons! Drop them now!”
“We will not, ar’Talvlyn,” said the one who had spoken before, who seemed to be some sort of leader. His Alban was precise and without accent. “But we will leave now. You will let us go, unharmed and without hindrance.”
Bayrd shifted Isileth in his hands, flexing his fingers on the long hilt, ready for the next cut. “Give me a reason why,” he said.
“Né, né. St’teyyn ess’kai djuh, tulath,” said Eskra, the Droselan Bayrd never knew she spoke coming out slurred, venomous and perfect. “Give me a reason.” It was a tone of voice that Bayrd had never heard her use before, and would be happy not to hear again. If there were ever words in the sound that Isileth’s edges made as her blade left the scabbard, they would sound like this. “Tell me why I shouldn’t blow your backbone through the wall of this fortress.”