FIERCE: Sixteen Authors of Fantasy

by Mercedes Lackey

  Her stomach sank. That was a lot of break-ins.

  “And what did Cormar do with the thieves who broke in before that?”

  “The watcher before you took care of them.”

  She was afraid to ask. “Where is that watcher?”

  “In the city morgue. Died last night of multiple stab wounds,” he said, looking at her as if the question was dumb.

  Sara groaned. She supposed it was. Why else would they need a new fighter unless the old one was dead?

  The death bothered her, but she was practical. Fighters died. She could handle that and handle herself much better than whoever they had previously hired anyway. She was sure of it.

  Then Ezekiel said, “There’s a cot over there, a supply closet with materials on the far wall, and a food allowance. You can move a few things in, but don’t bring your family.”

  Sara froze. The position had come about so fast that it had never occurred to her that they would need her for more than the daylight hours.

  She turned around, muttering, “I can’t do this.”

  For the first time Ezekiel stopped fiddling with his golden beetle. As she walked toward the door he reached out a frantic hand to latch on to her upper arm.

  “Wait,” he shouted.

  She gave him a hardened glare and he let go of her hastily.

  “Please,” he pleaded, giving her his full attention. “What do you mean you can’t do this? You promised Cormar!”

  “I promised him nothing. I thought this job would be a few hours a day. Now you’re saying I have to live here,” she snapped. “I can’t do that.”

  He looked at her and shook his head. “If you leave, he’ll blame me.”

  “He won’t if you find a replacement,” she said.

  “Where am I supposed to find that?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, the mercenary’s guild?”

  He grimaced. “They don’t like me there.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s confidential.”

  “Confidential enough to get your ass kicked if you walked through that guild’s doors?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted.

  “What in the world could you have possibly done to piss off the entire mercenary’s guild?” she said.

  He pushed his falling spectacles up the bridge of his nose and glared.

  “Never mind, I can take a guess.”

  He sniffed.

  She said, “Look, I want to help you. I do. But I can’t be here all day and night. I can’t live here. I have a family of my own.”

  My mother, she thought silently.

  He started trembling. “What am I going to do?”

  “Not my problem,” Sara said, walking toward the door.

  She heard a clatter from behind her. She turned around to see that Ezekiel had knocked a small acorn off of a bench. It bounced and rolled until it stopped in front of her feet. She bent down to pick it up gingerly. In her hands it had a warm muted glow of amber. It was very pretty.

  She looked up to see Ezekiel kneeling on the floor as he sat back with a look of pure resignation on his face. He looked like a man who knew he was going to die and had accepted his fate.

  Sara let out a breath slowly and grimaced.

  “Two days,” she said.

  Ezekiel’s head snapped up. “Two days?”

  “I’ll help you for two days. We’ll go to the mercenary’s guild tomorrow and get a replacement.”

  Her voice was firm.

  “Think Cormar will accept that?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, “but he won’t really have a choice. I only took this job for the money. But it’s not worth it to leave my mother alone. I’ll find something else.”

  Ezekiel looked a tad doubtful, but he didn’t question her. He was probably too grateful that his imminent death had a stay of execution to pester her.

  “Now,” she said, “why don’t you get back to doing whatever it is you do here?”

  He nodded and stood.

  “What are you going to do?” he said.

  “I’m going to check the exterior perimeter for weak spots in the mage field. Then I’m going over every inch of the walls to see how those thieves were sneaking in.”

  “Sounds like a good plan.”

  Sara smirked. She doubted he knew what she was looking for.

  “Ezekiel?” Sara said.

  “Yes?”

  “Catch!”

  She threw the amber acorn to him and watched as he caught it after a few fumbles. Just before he caught it, the priceless artifact almost hit the floor. Again.

  Chapter V

  “STAY INSIDE,” SARA TOLD EZEKIEL. She took a calm breath and strode out the door. Her back was stiff and her gait was sure, but inside she was quaking with doubt. This was the first time she had deliberately flouted the law and her mother’s rules at the same time. Come hell or high water, for the next two days she would defend this warehouse with her life. She would just have to send a messenger home to her mom saying that she had agreed to work the overnight shift. But she hoped to the gods’ own lives that her mother never found out what she was really doing. She wouldn’t survive that confrontation, she was sure of it.

  Sara shook her head to clear her mind of the grim thoughts. With a wary hand on her knife, she paced the exterior of the building, checking for obvious entrances, holes in the wall and damage put there by thieves. She saw none while she paced around all four sides. She noted however that the building was built of some kind of thin metal sheeting. Small, rectangular windows were interspersed regularly high up near the ceiling. Sara could tell in a glance that they were much too small for anyone to climb through, and besides, they were clearly sealed shut. The entire building had four walls, a peaked roof, and stood in a long, rectangular shape. The only entrance was the one she and Ezekiel had entered through. Even the magical protections surrounding it were impenetrable. Which left only two explanations. They had gotten in through the roof or through the front door.

  She stepped back from the front entrance until she had a clear view of the sloping roof. She couldn’t see much from here, but she had feeling that five sets of thieves had known something that she currently did not. Sara paced around the walls one more time. On this circuit she looked for a tear or irregularity in the roofing structure. Halfway down and on the ocean side of the building facing away from the fisherman’s wharf, she found it.

  It wasn’t all that obvious, if you weren’t looking for it. But she was.

  Sara grunted in satisfaction while she kept her eyes on the small metal pole protruding from the sloped roof. It was no bigger than her hand but she had the feeling it was strong enough to hold the weight of a person climbing up the walls. Excited, she trotted back to the front and into the warehouse. As she sprinted between the benches to see if her theory of a hole in the roof was true, she stopped cold. She felt something weird. Like a presence that her instincts were telling her not to ignore. Not the mention the fact that her curator was gone. She knew Ezekiel would have never left the artifacts alone, not of his own volition. If he’d been forced to leave through the front door, the man should have at least known enough to scream and catch her attention. She would have come running.

  So Sara carefully assessed the rows in front of her. Nerves alive, she looked for what her eyes couldn’t see. She opened her ears and sharpened her hearing. She heard the pants of muffled breathing in front of her.

  “Might as well come out,” she said. “I know you’re here.”

  Then the cloak fell. A man stood in front of her. Ezekiel stood in front of him with a sharp knife held at his throat. The man was gripping him tightly. Sara quickly spotted one other man with his back turned to the three of them about six rows back.

  “Nice trick,” she said. She carefully took in the situation. She wondered if she was dealing with a mage, but she didn’t think so. Her battle instincts told her she was dealing with a normal man. Those instincts were almost never wrong. However, there wa
s something magical about him. Narrowing her eyes, she realized it was the pendant around his neck. It was giving off an aura of old magic. She was impressed.

  Haven’t seen one of those before, she thought.

  It was an object of residual magic and imbued with a specific gift. In this case, the ability to cloak the man and his compatriot in a mobile sight shield. The problem with objects like that was that they could only accomplish one thing. They could do it perfectly but nothing else. Which meant the man hadn’t been able to muffle the sound of his breathing like he would have if he had been a true mage with a sight and sound shield.

  She took out her knife and wished she had a sword at the moment. Screw the wharf rules.

  “Who are you?” she said tightly.

  “Not important,” said the man in a relaxed voice with an inflection that indicated an educated background.

  She said through gritted teeth, “It is to me.”

  He stared at her with cold eyes. “Edgar, it’s time to go.”

  He wasn’t talking to her that time. The man in the back startled and turned around. When his cape moved, she saw a rotund belly, several chins, and thick, squinty eyes. Not a threat.

  “Already?” said Edgar in a whine.

  “Yes,” said the man tightly.

  “But there’s so much here.” Edgar clearly didn’t understand the gravity of the situation.

  “Get what you came for and let’s go,” said the man with his knife at Ezekiel’s throat as he stepped forward. He was watching Sara warily.

  She mirrored his actions with a thin smile.

  He raised an eyebrow and pressed the knife down on Ezekiel’s throat. A thin red line of blood appeared and dripped down. The curator of the artifacts whimpered. She halted.

  “I would stay where you are.”

  They faced each other resolutely. From behind them all, Edgar whined again, “Is this about her? Kill her.” Her eyes flickered to Edgar. He sounded like a child.

  The man’s face hardened. He apparently didn’t like Edgar’s tone any more than she did.

  “But don’t kill the curator!” Edgar hastily said. “We need him.”

  “Do you, now?” Sara cooed with a smile. She had her in. The man in front of her realized Edgar’s mistake at the same time she did. He couldn’t kill Ezekiel even if he threatened him. Which made Ezekiel’s position as a human shield improbable.

  She ran forward with her knife in one hand, her dagger in her other. He tossed Ezekiel to the floor with a curse in order to meet her head-on with both of his knives in hand. They came together in a clash of slashes, kicks, and whirls. She tried to slit his throat with her knife in her right hand while keeping out of reach of his longer knives. She was successful in the latter, thwarted in the former. So they circled each other warily as Ezekiel coughed on the floor. Too late she noticed they were moving toward the back of the warehouse. Closer to his partner, Edgar. When she looked around out of the corner of her eyes to locate the rotund man she noted that he was plastered against the far wall and edging to the door. Not a threat. But still he was stealing something out of their warehouse.

  She called out, “Ezekiel, stop him! He’s getting away.”

  The curator’s head popped up from between the benches and he looked around warily. He spotted the man leaving the building. “You’re joking, right?”

  He ducked back down. Sara rolled her eyes and exchanged swift slashes with the man in front of her. Neither of them seemed to be gaining the advantage.

  “Fine,” snapped Sara. “But he’s taking your statue.”

  Ezekiel leaped up faster than she would have ever given him credit for.

  By that time Edgar was swiftly walking just past the hiding spot Ezekiel occupied. When the bespectacled man spotted the golden statue in the fat man’s hands, he let out an inhuman shriek. “Not the statue of Tirsaman!”

  With a yowl, he launched himself at the thief.

  Sara lifted a surprised eyebrow. “Not exactly what I had in mind, Ezekiel.”

  Ezekiel wasn’t paying her the least bit of attention. He was wrapped around the fat man’s body as they struggled for ownership of the golden statue.

  Then her opponent grabbed a round candlestick complete with a build-up of wax from a nearby bench. He threw the heavy object at her. It nicked her on the cheek and she felt the drip of blood down her skin.

  “Got your attention now?” taunted the man.

  “Fully,” she said with a snarl.

  Sara jumped high into the air, knife at the ready. The man dodged back to avoid her. But it had never been her intention to stab him. The leap was just to get him to move back. When she landed directly in front of him, he had nowhere to go with a bench against his back. She swiftly twisted and kicked him high in the face. His head snapped back with an audible crack. His body fell into the bench behind him with a crash.

  She stood over her dead opponent and said, “Do I have yours now?”

  Turning Sara saw Ezekiel still rolling around on the ground with the fat man. They moved like two snakes in the grass, each one trying to yank the statue from the other’s hands. Then Ezekiel got some strength from where she didn’t know and yanked the statue back with a triumphant sound. When the man beneath him tried to take it from him, Ezekiel banged him atop the head with it. Twice.

  When the man stopped moving, Ezekiel slowly stood up and began rearranging his clothes with a yank of his hand.

  “Did it feel good?” said Sara dryly.

  Ezekiel blinked at her. “What?”

  “Overpowering him.”

  He looked back down at his unconscious opponent and back up at her. “Actually…yeah.”

  His voice was full of surprise and wonder.

  He puffed up his chest. “I did pretty well, didn’t I?”

  She raised a sarcastic eyebrow. “For a man who has clearly never fought in his life? Yes.”

  That backhanded comment didn’t seem to deter him.

  “What have you got there?” she said as she watched him turn the statue back and forth in his hands.

  “The statue of Tirsaman,” he said, walking over to a bench further away.

  “What does it do?”

  Ezekiel mumbled something she didn’t hear. Sara decided that checking on their living opponent was more vital at the moment. She went over to the fat man to feel for a pulse and patted him down for any weapons he might have concealed on him. When she found none, she grunted and hauled him up by the arm to drag his limp body over to a corner. It was empty except for one lone chair.

  Then she walked over toward the door, passing Ezekiel along the way.

  “Well?” she asked.

  He looked up at her and back down at the statue without answering.

  “Now would be a good time to speak up, Ezekiel.”

  “It’s classified. Boss’s orders.”

  “Classified knowledge from the watcher who’s supposed to be guarding it and just killed someone who wanted to take it from his collection?”

  He grimaced and adjusted his necktie.

  “Fine,” she said, throwing up her hands and striding to the door.

  “Where are you going? You promised you wouldn’t leave! Two days, you said.”

  She didn’t turn around or stop walking. “I meant what I said. Unless you’re going to tie that fellow up with air, we need some rope to bind this gentleman, and I saw some right outside the door.”

  “Oh.”

  In short order they had the man gagged and bound to the only non-magical chair in the room. When he was trussed up in the corner, she removed his friend’s body and hauled him outside to throw in the ocean, then set about helping Ezekiel right the overturned benches near the front. Those two hadn’t known how to fight, but they had certainly left a mess in their wake rolling around like mud wrestlers.

  “Thank you,” said Ezekiel as they put the final artifact back in place.

  “You’re welcome,” said Sara as she dusted off her palms.
>
  “It supposedly has the ability to make anyone or anything into a god,” said Ezekiel.

  “Excuse me?” said Sara. She thought she had heard him incorrectly.

  “The statue of Tirsaman,” he replied, shifting back and forth on his feet. “That’s what it does.”

  She turned fully to Ezekiel then. “You want to repeat that? Slowly? You have a statue that can turn a person into a god sitting in your dank warehouse?”

  “Well, yeah,” he admitted with a sniff. “Or, well, that’s one of the things it supposedly does. There have been rumors and legends for years. But not any proof.”

  I guess he had to tell someone, rules be damned, and I’m the only one here, she thought with irony.

  “How?”

  “That would be the one hundred-shilling question,” he said. “No one’s quite sure. It didn’t exactly come with instructions.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Has anyone ever tried using it?”

  “Not with any noticeable effect.”

  She felt some relief. She really didn’t need any working human-to-god changing statues on her watch. She looked over at the unimposing figurine. It was only a statue in the sense that it was vaguely human-shaped. It was more of a vertical blob with odd ridges and bumps, as if it had been subjected to an intense heat and parts of it had melted off.

  “Well, where did it come from?”

  “The boss found it in a salvaged ship off the coast.”

  “And you know it is what you say it is because…?”

  He stiffened in anger, like she had insulted his dead mother.

  “It’s my job to know.”

  “Right,” she said before wandering off.

  I wonder just how many of these artifacts are just salvaged junk, she thought to herself, It’s obvious from the thievery though, that enough people believe they’re real. Regardless of whether the artifacts are the real deal or not, these idiot thieves will stab me for the remote possibility that they could claim ownership of a god-turning statue.

  Then the front door banged open with a gust of wind, and she whirled and threw her knife straight at the intruder’s head.