by Daniel Ford
“Bolt missed the bones, I think, or nicked them lightly. Fortune knows how.” Torvul carefully toed away a divot of sod, bent down, and began rubbing the head of the bolt into the dirt. “Can’t burn this; smoke’ll kill you faster than any other way.” Then he turned and looked toward the slight rise into the woods where Idgen Marte had disappeared. “She must’ve found the bowman.”
“She did. She is on her way back.” Allystaire’s voice, deprived of its usual potency, still came out in a kind of croak. How do I know that exactly? Question for another day.
As if cued, Idgen Marte appeared, leading the would-be assassin with her sword point resting at the precise juncture of his skull and his neck. In her other hand she gingerly carried, by the stock, the crossbow that had fallen from his hands when she’d kicked him clear of the tree.
He was a compact man, neither small nor large but with an easy grace and an apparent vitality. His long hair was tied in a neat queue and his face covered by a few days’ worth of stubble. His deceptively simple-looking clothing was colored grey and dark green and would pass, from a distance, as the raiment of a forester. Up close, it was too well-tailored, with hints of silk beneath the cuffs. The knee-high boots were made of supple leather that few lacking a title could afford.
The corner of his quilted jacket was torn and bloody, where Idgen Marte’s throwing knife had wounded him, and where it was still buried.
Allystaire forced himself unsteadily to his feet. You’ve lost more blood than this in a tourney joust, he thought, and rebuked himself into putting some strength in his knees. He caught Idgen Marte’s face before she composed it into her usual smirk; was that a flash of fear he had seen? Not likely. He cleared his throat as he sought what to say, but his thoughts were driven away by Torvul’s sudden yelling.
“Where did you get that?” He pointed at the crossbow Idgen Marte carried in her left hand. He rushed to her side and seized the weapon, holding it up to inspect. It was long and slim; the stock was a dark varnished wood, with a thin, twisting spiral for the hand and wrist to slip through and against which the arm would brace. It looked like a branch that a vine had grown into, then been cut out of by a patient woodcarver. The top of it bore a number of small, hinged pieces, not unlike Torvul’s own bow.
“I bought it,” the bowman said. “From one of your kinsmen, no doubt. All of you link-grubbing dwarfs are kin, right?”
Torvul swung his dangerously glittering eyes from bow to bowman. “These aren’t sold. Not ever. Not to…” Here he paused and looked from Allystaire to Idgen Marte and then back to the man. “Not to such as you.”
“We can deal with that later.” Idgen Marte drove her boot straight into the back of the assassin’s knee, and he fell roughly to the ground, crying out as he threw out his wounded arm to cushion his fall. “We need to know who hired him.”
“No more of that,” Allystaire said, in as sharp a tone of command as he could muster. Voice is still plenty sharp, he assured himself, and indeed, Idgen Marte flushed slightly but didn’t respond. He could feel her roiling anger, see the tension in her limbs, the unusually tight grip on her sword hilt.
He walked up close to the prisoner, taking him in, sizing up his green eyes and the defiant set of his jaw. He seized the man’s chin, but the assassin tore free of his grip with a sharp tug of his thickly muscled neck. Allystaire reached out again, and the man suddenly cursed, his composure shattering in a rush of anger.
“I’ve been told what you do, sorcerer. I won’t give in to it. My mind is my own! I’ll not have it torn open for you to paw through!”
Allystaire’s eyes rolled lightly, and he suddenly wrapped his right hand firmly around the man’s neck. “I do not care what you have been told, what you want, or what you think about the sovereignty of your mind. If what they told you is that I will drag the truth from you and that I may hang you for being what you are, well, they were not wrong. Now then, what is your name?”
Allystaire tightened the grip of his fingers, though he was careful not to choke the man. He narrowed his eyes and directed his senses from his mind, through his hand, and into an awareness of the other man—it was like and yet unlike the times he had healed wounds. He gained a fuller awareness of the man, felt the pain that pulsed in his shoulder, the knife that still lodged there, the other smaller injuries he’d sustained in falling out of the tree, and the well-concealed fear that made his heart beat just a bit faster than it should.
“Dunlir.” The man swallowed dryly, his throat moving against Allystaire’s palm.
“All right, Dunlir, why poison me?”
“Specific orders: Whore’s Kiss, and it had to be in your left arm.”
“That answers how, not why. Who gave those orders to you? Who hired you and why?” Allystaire felt a resistance beginning to build against his questions, and Dunlir’s eyes shut tightly, his teeth ground together, and his lips began to turn white. Allystaire concentrated more intently, his owns eyes screwing shut, pressing his mind harder against the assassin’s.
“Is…Ismaurgh. Man I’ve known a long time. Said your left arm needed the poison. That was key. Without it, no chance.”
Allystaire’s eyes flew open when Dunlir answered him, and he looked to Idgen Marte, who was as shocked as he was, and as frightened. Someone knows too much about the Mother’s Gifts, he thought. And has thought of how to counter them.
“Who is this Ismaurgh? Who employs him?”
Suddenly the resistance became a wall that shot up so quickly in front of Allystaire that he had no time to react. Dunlir began thrashing violently, foam flecking the corners of his mouth, and Allystaire stumbled away. He quickly recovered and wrapped his hand back around the thrashing man’s throat, but Dunlir had lost all sense of himself and fallen to the ground. Allystaire fell roughly onto one knee beside him. Before even asking a question, there was the sense of some huge, powerful will not only resisting him, but actively pushing back against his queries.
Idgen Marte rushed to the thrashing man’s other side and laid her hands upon him, trying to calm him, but to no effect; he thrashed and flopped like a fish pulled onto a dock. Allystaire lifted his still weak left arm and laid it upon Dunlir, reaching out for whatever injury was at fault, but found nothing.
“It is in his mind!” Idgen Marte shouted, as a stream of foam-flecked gibberish began to issue from Dunlir’s mouth, his face darkening to a deep purple, and once again she reached for him; Allystaire resorted to simply pressing against the man, laying his hands on Dunlir’s arms and pinning them to the ground.
Idgen Marte’s eyes closed, and Allystaire could feel her reaching out and suddenly being swatted away like an insect. Her eyes rolled beneath their lids and she crumpled to the ground. The thrashing assassin forgotten, Allystaire lunged to her side, catching her neck in his left hand. He felt a steady pulse, but her breathing had slowed significantly; she was deeply unconscious. Meanwhile, Dunlir had begun to heave and groan, and emitted a terrible gurgling sound as foamy liquid began to gush from his mouth. Allystaire was aware of a smell like the sea, followed by the sharp twang of a bowstring, and feathers sprouted from the very center of Dunlir’s head. All thrashing ceased.
Allystaire sat up on one knee, carefully lifting Idgen Marte into a sitting position, cradling her with his weakened arm and his chest. Torvul stood but a few feet away, the assassin’s crossbow quivering in his hands from the bolt it had just fired.
“A mercy killing,” the dwarf said thickly. “He was drowning, drowning from inside his own body. How, I don’t know, but it hasn’t got the stink of sorcery.”
“It was Braech,” Allystaire said darkly. “The Church of the Sea Dragon was behind this.”
“The Father of Waves and I are destined to be at odds, it seems.” A voice rang across the morning like a clear bell, with tones as pure and bright as polished silver. Allystaire’s head snapped up, Idgen Marte stirred in his
arms, and Torvul’s jaw dropped as an intensely bright ray of the sun suddenly resolved itself into the glowing, vibrant form of the Goddess.
Allystaire was already on one knee, and Torvul quickly joined him, setting aside the crossbow. The dwarf did not, however, avert his eyes, even as the Mother’s approach brought with it a nearly painful radiance.
“Strength, freedom, a man striving to do what he can because he can…these sound so noble until one realizes that strength is so often an accident of birth,” She mused. Her eyes fell with pity upon Dunlir’s corpse, and She shook her head sadly. “He was not a good man and I do not think you could have saved him. I think, my Knight and my Shadow, I would have seen you bring him to his end. But a more just end, a cleaner end than this.” She was suddenly standing before Allystaire and Idgen Marte, and Her hands rested atop their heads.
Allystaire’s body thrummed with the power of her touch, and the weakness of the poison, the ache in his knees and his back, melted before its heat. Idgen Marte, too, stirred and sat up of her own power. In his mind, he heard the Goddess’s voice.
Your death was too near today, My Arm. I am proud of you, and I love you, yet there is so much more I must ask of you that I fear that you may not love Me. You may regret, when these trials come before you, what I have made of you.
“Never,” Allystaire answered aloud, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes at the ferocity of his denial. Her presence was so enormous, so powerful, that it drove away everything but the desire for Her voice, Her touch, the suggestion of Her love or approval.
He knew, dimly, that Idgen Marte was hearing Her voice as well, but not the same words he heard. Then the Goddess turned from them and was standing in front of Torvul, who watched Her warily.
“Do you still discredit Me, Son of the Earth?”
“I’d say things are leaning in your favor, Lady,” Torvul replied a bit hoarsely.
The Goddess threw back Her head and filled the field with a pealing laughter like sunlight being fractured by the brilliance of polished crystal.
“It is that very Wit that has brought you before me, Mourmitnourthrukacshtorvul. Today, you valued the life of two men beyond any price of gold. I know the words you sang when you healed them, and I know how long it has been since you sang them. I know how much it has hurt you.” She reached down and took Torvul’s hands in Her own, and stood the dwarf up on unsteady legs, though Allystaire knew from experience that the Goddess could have lifted any of them as they might lift a child.
Allystaire looked to Idgen Marte and she nodded; they walked off; when the Mother ordained one of those She had Called, She did so for the chosen one’s eyes and ears alone.
* * *
Whether it was a few minutes, or a turn of the glass, Allystaire could not have said; he and Idgen Marte did not speak. Such was the daze that the touch of the Goddess brought upon them both that they simply wandered out of sight. Yet soon enough they knew they were called back, and they found the door of the farmhouse open and radiance streaming out of its windows. Wide-eyed, they hastened through the door.
They found the Goddess standing just inside, turning Her head as She surveyed the carnage within. And then Her shoulders shook, and Her face lowered into Her upturned hands, and She wept.
In Allystaire’s ears, the sound was the very death of joy; it was silver harp strings curling and popping in a fire. Deep inside him the anger that he had known when using Her Gifts in battle began to hum in his veins, and because he had no means to vent his rage, perhaps it made him bold, but for the first time in his service to Her, he spoke unbidden.
“Goddess,” he said, his mouth dry, his voice raspy, “I will tear apart the world of men to find the man who has done this thing in Your sight, to find the man who has made You weep.”
She turned toward him then and took Her hands from Her face. “And that, my Knight, my Arm, my First Paladin, is why I chose you.” She held up her right palm, and a few shimmering teardrops lay upon it; She tilted Her hand, extended a finger, and a single drop rolled down and toward the floor. When it landed, the room flashed in a light so bright that Allystaire felt certain he should be blinded; Idgen Marte clutched at his arm in the wake of it, but when he blinked his eyes open, he found, first, that he saw.
Second, the room had changed. What had once been a charnel house of body parts, of blood and gore, was now immaculately clean. Five corpses, one a man of Allystaire’s age, one a woman of similar years, and three children, lay in repose on the floor. Their skin was waxy and pale, but their wounds mercifully hidden behind white burial shrouds. “A small mercy, but it is all I can give to them now,” She said softly. “It is not given, even to me, to pluck back a spirit from the next world.” Her voice, Her face, were shot through with sadness, but resignation.
“Mourmitnourthrukacshtorvul,” She said, turning toward the dwarf and extending Her hand, palm up, with a tiny radiant pool of glistening tears still in it.
The dwarf knew precisely what to do; he retrieved an empty bottle from a pouch on his jerkin, uncorked it, and held it toward Her. She bent Her hand, and the tears slid from Her palm and neatly into the bottle. “These are not miracles,” She said then, gently. “Yet all just and earned tears have power, of a kind. Perhaps, my Wit, in your new work you may find a use for them.”
Then She addressed all of them. “The world notices your coming, my Chosen, my Servants—and the powerful begin to fear you. The folk of this village come now, and you must minister to them as you are able, but you must not tarry here. There is much work for you to do, and it lies distant. You must make for My people places of Light in this world. You must show them that there may still be brightness in the face of a gathering darkness.”
Allystaire, Idgen Marte, and Torvul turned and followed as She moved through the door of the farmhouse, and a gathering of townfolk with mattocks and shovels gasped as Her radiance greeted them, and many fell prostrate before Her, tools clattering to the ground.
“Do not hide your eyes from Me, good people,” She said, though Her voice was already growing distant, her brightness dimming. “I am the Mother, and I do not demand your fear and prostration. I bring you love, and hope it is returned; my Chosen Servants are come to bring you hope.” She turned to indicate Allystaire, Idgen Marte, and Torvul, and then vanished in a brief flash.
“Tough one to take the stage after,” Torvul muttered, He wiped the back of one hand against a dab of wetness at the corner of his eye and added, “Dusty in here.”
* * *
Turns later, the cleaned, wrapped bodies had been lowered into a family grave. Allystaire had helped with the digging as much as his weakened arm would allow, and Torvul had proven himself a more able hand with a spade than any other present. Idgen Marte had spoken with Cuisin, calming him, for the man had started to go to pieces once the shock had worn off and the reality set in. Then she had spoken with other victims of the previous night, among whom she still mingled.
Allystaire silently sat with Torvul near the hearth, upon which the innkeep had laid and stoked a blazing fire, as if preparing for a cold night. In fact it had made the room so warm that Allystaire suddenly stood and walked across the stone floor, his boots clomping loudly against the general silence, and began carefully pushing aside the thin hides that covered the windows. A chiller air immediately began to fill the room, and he returned heavily and wearily to his seat. Suddenly he winced and set his left elbow gingerly upon the table.
“Y’know boy, all I really did was stop the poison. You still took a bolt to the arm. You’re damned lucky that it doesn’t seem to have shattered the bones, but still, we’ll need to do something more about it.” Torvul’s hand was curled reflexively around the handle of a large clay mug, and a similar one, foam still sloshing at its rim, sat in front of Allystaire.
“I have taken wounds before. And I heal fast.”
“Not fast enough,” Torvul insi
sted, rapping a scarred knuckle on the table. “Tomorrow you won’t be able to strap your shield around your arm. You lost blood; believe me, a lot of it soaked into my boots. I’m at the limit of what I could do. Your turn at playing chirurgeon now.”
Allystaire turned his grimacing face to the dwarf. “I am reluctant to use the Mother’s Gifts on myself, and frankly, I do not know if I can.”
“Pssst. Nonsense.” Torvul took a long draw off his beer and gave the mug a shake to determine its fullness. He set it down and reached out to hook Allystaire’s with two fingers. “You lose blood, you can’t be drinking beer. Now, are you going to sit there and mope and brood, or are you going to heal yourself?”
“I am not brooding,” Allystaire protested, curling his left hand into a weak and white-knuckled fist.
“If you aren’t yelling or preaching or killing something, chances are you’re brooding,” Idgen Marte put in, suddenly arriving at the table and plopping into a seat. In her right hand she clutched two clay mugs of a piece with Allystaire and Torvul’s; in her left, a smaller mug with no foam topping it, which she set before Allystaire. She slid it in front of him; he sniffed the air, and his eyes widened.
“Innadan brandy?” He lifted the mug to his nose and inhaled deeply. “The real kind, not the pomace. Where in Cold did you find this?”