Peter Morwood - The Clan Wars 02

by Widowmaker

  “‘Just a flesh wound.’ ” Eskra produced a feeble grin from somewhere and managed to keep it in place. “Isn’t that what I’m supposed to say? Especially if it’s worse…” As Bayrd made for the bed she moved her hand away, looked in disbelief, then shook her head and laughed shakily. “But what should I say when it is just a flesh wound? I’ve cut myself more deeply sharpening a pen.”

  That wasn’t quite true. Whatever had caused the damage had left a deep, clean cut in her bicep. Not a telek dart, then; that would have been an obvious puncture or a ragged gash. They never did find out, either then or later, and put the injury down to something that had happened during the first frantic struggle in the dark. Bayrd was happy to leave it at that, because the alternative was more sinister than he cared to consider.

  His own thought was that he had inflicted the wound himself, but the thought remained unvoiced because to say anything aloud would have forced him inexorably to the darker suspicion underlying it. Isileth Widowmaker, that hungry blade, had made an attempt to eliminate her only rival for his affections.

  And he had long ago stopped laughing at such notions.

  One of the oldest of the many traditions surrounding Albans and their great taiken longswords, was that war blades should never be drawn under a friendly roof for any reason save display. It held that the curved taipan shortsword was the only blade proper for use in defence of home and family. It was something which provoked smiles of tolerant mockery from the younger generation of kailinin, all of whom knew well enough that if the need arose, they would use whatever was first at hand, be it axe or mace or sword of any length at all.

  But Bayrd had an uneasy feeling that in common with many of the old customs, the reasoning behind it – however long forgotten – was a sound one. Sorcery and the Art Magic had long been considered beneath the notice of a true Alban warrior, and with that lack of notice went other knowledge. Knowledge that he, and maybe others, had long preferred to ignore even when it was blatantly obvious to all but the most deliberately blind.

  When their wielder’s blood was up, even the lesser, nameless taikenin could be frighteningly indiscriminate in their hunger. There had been evidence enough of that before the Albans left Kalitzim, and much more of it in the past few years when longsword met longsword in small feuds over land. Even then, in their proper place on the field of battle, that hunger wasn’t quite so dangerous as in the confines of indoors.

  But the named-blades, weapons whose history and lineage was often older than that of the men who carried them, were another matter. They could be dreadful things, all too easily awakened, and reluctant to sleep again even when their work was done. The stories said that they were live blades, in more than just the casual sense of being sharp rather than blunted steel.

  Weapons, so the saying went, were neither good or evil; only the deeds done with them by men. That was trite, and never more so when used of a named-blade taiken. There was supposed to be something of the soul of the smith in every blade forged by a master. If that soul was dark, given to violence or impatience, then so too was the sword.

  It might make the blade especially dangerous to the members of a given clan, or unlucky and given to missing the stroke, or turning in the hand at a vital moment. That was why knowing the provenance of a given taiken was so important. It could be a matter of life and death.

  No-one knew for certain who had hammered Isileth all those years ago from the billet of braided star-steel that gave the blade her formal title. But her new name was just as appropriate. In the Alban language, widow was like wizard and warrior: it had no gender of its own, and so applied equally to both.

  Bayrd looked once more at the cut in Eskra’s arm, and shivered again. And this time, he was sure that cold was not the cause.

  Widowmaker was back in her scabbard and the scabbard safely restored to its rack on the wall. The fire in the retiring-room had been lit again, to provide somewhere they could be while the vile mess in the bedroom was being cleaned up. And the children were with them.

  Marla was sound asleep in Eskra’s lap with all the unconcern of a two-year-old who had never really woken up, while Harel, not quite four, filled with excitement at being up so late and determined to make the most of it, was fighting a losing battle with her own heavy eyelids. Neither of them looked frightened. Bayrd guessed that they’d never even seen their potential kidnappers, much less whatever sudden savagery Gemmel ar’Ekren had visited on the Shadowthieves’ heads.

  A strange one, that. A traveller and a scholar now, but almost certainly a soldier or worse at some time in his past, if the way he had snapped orders at the guards was an example and if the way he was stalking the corridors of the citadel even now was any indication. And all the time, a sorcerer.

  “No, lord,” the old man had corrected. “Not a sorcerer. That’s too much a user of the Talent. I’m just a bookman and an enchanter. A spellsinger. An-purkanyath, you would call me.”

  Calling him a rescuer would be more appropriate; and yet no more appropriate than discovering their guest was a wizard. Looking at the matter objectively, it was strange how little surprised either he or Eskra had been. As if they had known his secret all along – if it was a secret at all, and not something Gemmel had kept back simply because no-one had asked.

  Now there was a fine sort of question to ask strangers, thought Bayrd, smiling to himself. Are you a wizard, sorcerer, enchanter or in any other way involved with the use of the Art Magic? He played briefly with how any other clan-lord would react, and felt his smile go sour.

  Why bother?

  They were all reacting badly enough already. Especially the one who had sent the talathen. Who had it been? What had they hoped to gain by a kidnapping, which could not be achieved by a straightforward assassination that would probably have succeeded? And what would he do when he found out at last…?

  So many questions, so few answers. Bayrd closed his eyes briefly and stared at the red darkness inside their lids, but he could read nothing useful written there.

  There was a bandage around Eskra’s arm, and a simple charm of binding underneath. It was nothing complex, no spell of woven words to promote unnaturally rapid healing, just the sorcerous equivalent of the dozen or so stitches that would otherwise be needed to hold such a wound closed. She was capable of nothing more, and – even assuming he had the ability to control his Talent better – nor was he. Gemmel, perhaps expecting their refusal, had never even offered before he went out on self-appointed rounds to inspect the sentries one more time.

  So now they were both drained, exhausted, beyond the level of weariness that cries out for sleep and into the dull, aching fatigue beyond, where even sleep is too much effort and just sitting still is as much as anyone can do.

  And now would be the perfect time for a second group of talathen to enter the fortress and try to complete what the first squad had begun. Though the corridors of the citadel were more heavily guarded than before, those lords’-men and retainers had reached their peak of vigilance an hour ago, when the attempted kidnapping and murder was still a hot outrage in their minds. He knew from personal experience that such a peak could never be maintained, that it would start eventually to consume itself like a sheet of paper flung into a fire. Within a matter of another few hours, in the slack twilight time between the end of night and the beginning of morning, Dunrath-hold would be no better protected than it had been before all this began.

  He shook the notion from his head. It was unfair: his people were better than that. Weariness, and a delayed reaction to the bloody business upstairs, was making him depressed, as it so often did. Nobody could get into Dunrath unnoticed, much less get out again alive. As soon kick a beehive, and then hope to steal the honey without being stung. They were safe now, until the next time. With the thought and as if on cue, Harel’s head drooped sideways at last, and she slept.

  Bayrd gazed across the room, watching Eskra. She was no more than an outstretched hand away, staring at the hearth
, half-dozing, neither awake nor asleep but lost in a waking dream as her imagination wandered through the intricate tunnels between the glowing coals. There was no thought of their potential quarrel any more. It was forgotten, washed away in the blood from Eskra’s arm, in the blood of the dead talathen, in the brutal reminder that many worse things could happen than the loss of a friend.

  “’Skra-ain?” he said, softly so as not to wake the children. She blinked and came back from wherever she had been, looked at him and smiled slightly in the fire-warmed stillness.

  “Mmm?”

  “About Marc ar’Dru.” Bayrd was watching closely, but her drowsy expression didn’t change. “Tell me what happened to him. What made him say what he did? What made him different?”

  “His own wishes.”

  “Oh…”

  Bayrd had been expecting hesitation; a marshalling of thought; an oblique response that only gradually spiralled in towards the truth. Certainly nothing so direct and blunt, and any answer at all besides this one.

  “But… But he was my friend.”

  “And still is. He just doesn’t know it. And won’t until I release him.”

  “You?”

  “Listen more closely, loved. Remember what I told Vanek ar’Kelayr?” Eskra’s blue eyes narrowed, all drowsiness gone so that Bayrd wondered if it had ever really been there at all. The sapphire stare bored into him like twin needles. “No. Evidently you don’t.”

  Her shoulders moved in the suggestion of a shrug, just enough to make her meaning plain, not enough to waken Marla. “No matter. With one thing and another we’ve had more to think about this past couple of days than a half-hearted lecture on the Art that wasn’t being heeded. I was talking about an-pesoek’n. The small charms that sometimes have more effect than High Magic,” Eskra grinned briefly, “because nobody expects an adept to use them.”

  A word wandered up from Bayrd’s memory and through his mind. “You said that cu Ruruc might have used a… A glamour, wasn’t it?”

  “Well done.” Eskra patted her hands together in a silent, sardonic imitation of applause, even though a brief smile blunted the edge of any sarcasm. “You would be a capable enough pupil, loved, if all the other burdens of lordship didn’t keep getting in the way. Yes. A glamour.”

  “Why?”

  “You really don’t understand, do you? Even now.” Marla shifted on her mother’s lap, yawned, snuggled down again and returned to sleep without ever having been properly awake. Eskra stroked her daughter’s dark hair and said nothing for a while.

  “Marc ar’Dru has been your friend for years,” she said at last. “You’ve known it: I’ve known it. But because of that simple knowledge, you’ve never seen that he’s also the best and most faithful retainer you’ve ever had. Or ever will have.”

  She toyed with the long ringlets of Marla’s hair again, winding them around her fingers and then letting them coil free again.

  “Bayrd-ain,” Eskra’s voice was so soft now that she might have been speaking to the sleeping child, “he’s gone to act as your ‘spy in the enemy camp’. And he would have done it whether I helped him or not. Because he was willing to set aside his own honour so that yours would remain spotless. But at least this way he at least has a chance of getting out alive. All thanks to a small spell that changed the way he perceives his loyalties.”

  “You did that to him? Made him change? Made him say what he said?”

  “Yes. Rather than see him put his neck on the chopping-block. Yes. I did. Is that so wrong?”

  Bayrd shook his head; not a denial, just an attempt to understand. The convolutions of politics were one thing, but this deliberate deception and induced betrayal were – or had been – beyond his experience.

  “Marc would have gone anyway. Because someone has to. His words. Not mine. I had no reason to doubt his sincerity then. I still don’t. But now there won’t be a week, or a month, or a year of silence before we learn how he died. If we ever learned. He won’t die. Because he won’t be discovered. Not by accident, not by the most subtle questioning, not even by sorcery.” She met Bayrd’s dubious glance without wavering. “And in the meantime I’ll see what he sees. I’ll hear what he hears. I already know what he thinks…and what he knows.”

  There was something about that last, a thread of quietly salacious amusement too thin to surface as a smile, that made Bayrd’s cheeks burn with embarrassment. “So what does he know?” he said, sidestepping the unspoken question with a spoken one of his own. “What does my one-time Companion think?”

  “That he despises you for what happened to ar’Kelayr. That he’s an Alban kailin, an honourable man, and by the suspicious death of an enemy who was also your guest, you’ve proven that you most certainly are not.”

  Bayrd gazed at her without expression, but there was a hurt flicker in his eyes as though every word made him wince like a slap across the face. Eskra’s touch as she reached out toward him was far more gentle than that.

  “He’s not playing a role, so there’s no risk of him dropping out of character. His defence, my loved. And your defence too. No matter how close he comes to Kalarr cu Ruruc or Gerin ar’Diskan, he won’t attempt a murder. The least wizard worth his hire would know it. And cu Ruruc will be certain. No matter what spell I laid on Marc, he would never do that. Not unless I wrenched his brain so far asunder that he wouldn’t have been Marc ar’Dru any more. But after that, when all of them are sure of him, he’ll be able to come far closer, hear and see and know far more, than the best actor.”

  “Because he isn’t acting.”

  “No. Marc could never act that part well enough.” She reached out to touch his hand again. “But it’s only the spell, loved. Nothing but the spell. And when the time comes, he’ll be able to lay that spell aside more easily and willingly than he ever did your faith and fealty. Trust me. Will you trust me…?”

  “Have I a choice?”

  “You do,” said Gemmel’s voice from behind them both. “You can accept the lady’s word, or you can stand up and walk out now.”

  “Mollath Jowl! How long have you been there?” Even though Marla whimpered in her sleep and Harel stirred a little, Bayrd managed to modulate the snarl in his voice just in time. He didn’t manage to stop his right hand from closing on the hilt of his taipan. The left hand was busy trying to prevent his chair from toppling backwards to the floor as he surged up and out of it, and by the time he was fully on his feet the curved blade of the shortsword was already clear of its scabbard and glittering wickedly in the firelight.

  Gemmel studied man, and sword, and wife, and children, then gave them all that sweeping gesture of the hand and the little bow over it, less than ashamed about intruding on a clan-lord’s private apartment, never mind what even the least observant of men might have seen was a clan-lord’s private argument.

  “Long enough,” he said. His glance at the two feet of steel in Bayrd’s hand was of a man dismissing something that was no threat. There was something about the old wizard’s superb, assured arrogance that damped even Bayrd Talvalin’s anger, perhaps because it was meant to impress no one.

  “And what gives you the right to pass judgment on any choice of mine?”

  “Professional courtesy, as one wizard to another,” Gemmel said mildly. “Or should that be, one wizard among his peers?”

  Bayrd opened his mouth, reconsidered in the same instant and felt his teeth click shut on half a dozen possible responses. He returned the taipan to its sheath with a long, deliberate rasp of steel, and stared at Gemmel all the time he did so.

  “Never mind that.”

  It was Gemmel’s own verbal sidestep to the same question, and on Bayrd’s lips it might have sounded clumsy. But it was as adroit as any evasion he had executed on the fencing-floor, because it acknowledged and ignored all in one. Even while all his attention was focused on the wizard, he sensed a quick smile of approval from Eskra – although there was no disapproval of a man who had obviously never heard of knocki
ng on a closed door before coming through it.

  Professional courtesy, thought Bayrd. It works both ways. Or maybe all three…

  “Professional courtesy indeed,” said Gemmel. There was no indication if it was a continuation of what he had said before, or a blatant reading of Bayrd’s mind. “But courtesy or not, it doesn’t make the lady’s decision, or that of your Companion,” – and he even managed to give the Alban title its proper honorific inflection – “any more or less the only thing that could have been done in such a circumstance.”

  “What would you know about it?” That was deliberately rude, there was no oblique interpretation to take the sting out of it. And yet Gemmel did no more than raise one eyebrow, in another acceptance and dismissal that immediately put Bayrd delicately in the wrong.

  “You can do better than that, lord,” he said. “I’ve seen and heard it. So I can assume that what you said wasn’t from the heart. For which I thank you.” Again there was the bow and the hand-sweep, this time with such a smile that Bayrd would have been a churl even to attempt recovery of his fading advantage. Wisely, he didn’t waste the effort.

  “Kha’dagh! Enough of this. Master Gemmel, I owe you more than attempts at sarcasm. For the lives of my children, my wife – and mine too, at the end of it. And I owe you for my honour, which the talathen were trying to steal. So how can Clan Talvalin repay you? Gold? Silver? Rank…?”

  “With respect, lord, you have little enough gold or silver that you should spare none for passing strangers.”

  There was a silence after that. It stretched like a noosed neck, long enough and tight enough to become far more than just uncomfortable. “Is it that well known?” said Bayrd at last.

  “Well enough that I heard it on my way here.” Gemmel gazed carefully at the fire; it was probably less hot than the humiliation burning in Bayrd Talvalin’s face. “You’re luckier than I think you know, Bayrd-arluth. What I heard a dozen times had more than a dozen excuses to explain it away. And that was from peasants, yeomen farmers, people with nothing to gain or lose by telling what they thought was truth. Instead they defended you. Protected you. Lied for you… Such loyalty is as good as silver.”