by Alex Bledsoe
His smile was the patient expression of someone really tired of hearing jokes like that. “I’d like to ask you some questions about the incident on the Tallega road. Is there somewhere private we can talk?”
Another young uniformed soldier appeared at his elbow. This one was huge, with shoulders that strained the sash marking him as a mere private. He had the dull arrogance of someone used to applying force to any problem, and did not introduce himself.
Behind them, Gary Bunson hunkered down guiltily in a booth. So that’s how they found me. The man had a spine of wet pasta.
“My office is upstairs,” I said. “I haven’t been there in a week, so I can’t say what shape it’s in, but you’re welcome to come up.”
“I straightened it up a little,” Angelina said. “You’re a tenant, after all. It reflects on the whole establishment.” Her face was absolutely straight when she said this, but it was her way of assuring me there was nothing incriminating lying around.
I gestured toward the stairs. “After you, then, gentlemen. I’m still awfully slow at climbing things.”
Argoset headed up the steps first; I checked for dragons on his boots, but there were none. I was pretty sure I’d know the guy’s voice again when I heard it, but it never hurt to be overly cautious. Despite my warning, his muscle-bound companion dropped back to bring up the rear. He was about as subtle as a punch to the nose.
The stairs seemed to have grown steeper and higher since I’d been hurt, and without Liz behind me I would’ve tumbled backward down them quite ungracefully. I opened my office door and stepped aside to allow Liz, Argoset and Muscles to precede me, which gave my head time to stop swimming. The slab of beef balked, so I went in ahead of him. He followed, closed the door once we were all inside and then stood before it, arms crossed.
My office, in the attic over the kitchen, had once been used by workingwomen for functions not that morally dissimilar to my own. I’d put in a divider wall and another door to give me both a waiting room and a private inner office. I kept the front door unlocked, with a bench against one wall in case anyone decided they needed to wait. The dust on the bench was undisturbed, which said a lot about the recent demand for my services.
I unlocked the inner office, where I had a desk, two guest chairs, a sword cabinet and a hidden bottle of rum. Argoset took all this in with a slow, methodical sweep of his eyes. I went behind my desk and gratefully fell into my chair. Liz sat on the edge of the desk to my right, and Argoset took one of the guest seats. He sat upright, his spine and shoulders straight enough to draw lines with. Muscles closed the inner door and again stood with his back to it. If he’d stared at me any harder, his eyes would’ve shot across the room.
“Would anyone like a drink?” I said as I took the bottle from a drawer. “I haven’t had anything in a week that wasn’t flavored like green tea.”
Argoset shook his head. I looked questioningly at Muscles. He wrinkled his nose distastefully, although I wasn’t sure if it was because of me, the booze or the surroundings. I decided to hold off on that drink for myself as well.
Argoset took out a small wooden tablet with vellum sheets clipped to it. He lifted the first one and read, “ ‘Edward LaCrosse. Nationality unknown, age unknown, no apparent family.’ ” He cut his eyes at Liz, but she said nothing. “ ‘Current occupation personal soldiery, investigations into domestic indiscretions and so forth.’ I believe the slang term is ‘sword jockey,’ am I right?”
“When you call me that, smile.”
Argoset did not smile. “Where did you come from before you landed in Neceda?”
That story would take longer than Argoset could imagine. The tale of how a teenage heir to minor nobility lost the girl he loved and abandoned his fortune and title to become first an anonymous soldier, then a vicious mercenary and finally a middle-aged guy who offered his skills to private citizens would sound as ludicrous to him as it sometimes did to me. So I merely shrugged and said, “Around.”
“And how old are you?”
“Older than anyone else in the room.”
He looked steadily at me. Completely at odds with his youth, he had the cold, vaguely reptilian gaze of the intrinsically dangerous. “Mr. LaCrosse, why were you on the road to Tallega the night you were attacked? And spare me the wit, if you can.”
“I was doing an errand for a client.”
“Who was the client?”
I shook my head. The motion made my eyes cross a little. “That’s confidential. I’m sure you understand.”
“This is an official investigation of a murder.”
“And an attempted murder,” Liz put in.
“Yes,” Argoset agreed. “It was only luck that kept it from being a double homicide. We’re not even sure if you, or the young lady, were the intended victim.”
“Lots of people wouldn’t mind dropping me off a cliff,” I agreed. “But I’m pretty sure it was her.”
“You told Magistrate Bunson that you had no memory of the girl.”
He’d have to work harder than that to catch me out. “I didn’t then. Now I do. Lots of things are coming back to me.”
He closed the pad and looked at me. “I imagine, then, given your occupation, that you plan to conduct your own investigation based on some idea of personal honor and revenge.”
“Me? Nah. I plan on sleeping off this headache, which the priestess up the hill says may take six months even with whatever spells she does. Otherwise, I’ve got nothing on my schedule.”
Argoset tapped the tablet thoughtfully against his chin. “You really don’t seem like that kind of person.”
“He is,” Liz assured him. “I’ve seen swatting a fly exhaust him.”
Argoset put the tablet back in his pocket. “So you’re content to leave the investigation up to the people the king assigns to do this sort of thing?”
I shrugged. “It’s your job, not mine. I don’t have a client.”
He nodded again. His eerie, steady quality made me nervous, especially since it emanated from such a boyish face. I could imagine what it would do to someone who really did have a guilty conscience. Finally he said, “I don’t believe you, Mr. LaCrosse, but I do believe that your injuries will slow you down considerably and keep you from getting in my way. So I’ll leave you with this. A crime has been committed, and as far as we know, you are one of the victims. It wouldn’t require much traveling to look at things from the other side and see you as a suspect. Do you understand?”
I nodded, very slightly this time.
A slow, knowing smile spread across his face. It was not reassuring. “Right.” Argoset stood, nodded respectfully to Liz and left. Muscles fell in behind him. Liz followed, watched them descend the stairs, then closed the outer door behind them. She crossed her arms and said, “That was all kinds of strange, wasn’t it?”
I sighed and sagged in my chair. Even sitting up straight was exhausting. “Yeah. A sword jockey and some farm girl get ambushed, and suddenly the king’s security forces are all over the place.”
“What do you think it means?”
Before I could answer there was a soft, furtive knock at the door. Liz palmed a knife from her belt and stood flat against the wall beside it. “Yeah?” she said.
“It’s me,” Gary Bunson said. Liz let him in. “Did you talk to Argoset?” he asked at once.
“And his charming gorilla,” Liz said.
“Of course we talked to him,” I said, annoyed. “After you told him all about us, how could we not? Thanks for being such a pal.”
Bunson waved his hands in front of his face as if warding off bees. “Hey, Eddie, we’re friends, but when it comes down to a choice of asses to watch, my own comes first. I don’t know whose toes you stepped on, but this has to be serious. I didn’t think King Archibald even knew Neceda existed, and I’d just as soon he forgets that it does. So you better lay low for a while.”
“I’m getting that advice a lot.”
“I’m serious, Eddie. Argos
et is the golden boy up in Sevlow, and he has the king’s ear. He whispers, and people go away permanently. And he didn’t look happy when he came downstairs.” He looked from me to Liz and back, trying to impress us with his urgency.
“So why is he interested in this?” Liz asked.
Bunson shook his head. “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. We all have good things going here in Neceda. I don’t want to see any of us not around to enjoy them anymore.”
“Well, I’m too tired to do much about it right now,” I said honestly. “I’m going home and back to bed.”
Bunson looked at Liz. “You make sure of that?”
She smiled. “Absolutely.”
LIZ lay asleep beside me, naked, one leg draped over mine. A single candle on the table lit her skin in flickering waves of amber. Distant music from Angelina’s tavern mingled with the street sounds into a rolling, tinkling buzz. Inside we were warm, safe and sated.
Liz shifted a little, and clutched me tighter. I grunted as my ribs protested, but Liz didn’t wake and I wasn’t going to disturb her. Nothing like nearly dying to make you appreciate things like sex with your girlfriend. I was too weak to participate much in the physical part of our reunion, but my enjoyment seemed reward enough for her. If the situation was reversed I’d feel the same way, so I accepted it. Luxuriated in it, in fact. It was a feeling I never expected to have in my life, and I tried very hard not to second-guess it.
Our place was on the second floor of a rooming house three buildings down from the tavern. The old lady who owned the building dealt in small-time tariff-free liquor on the side, which everyone knew about but no one minded; Neceda collected shady entrepreneurs like manure drew flies. It meant being awakened by the occasional loud confrontation in the middle of the night and stepping over fresh bloodstains on the stairs in the morning, but the rent was cheap and the rooms were cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
Liz yawned and raised up on one elbow. She traced a finger down the old sword scar on my chest and said, “You’re not going to let it go, are you?”
“You know I’m not,” I said.
“Another man in your position might count himself lucky and just put it behind him. It really had nothing to do with you; you just stumbled over it and got caught in it.”
“That makes it my problem.”
She firmly grabbed my beard and turned my chin so I had to look her in the eye. “Why, Eddie?”
What could I tell her? The truth was that too many women in my life had died when I should’ve protected them. When I was sixteen it had been Janet, sister of my best friend, raped and killed while I was forced to watch. Years later it had been Liz’s twin sister, Cathy, a story I still kept from her. There had been dark Jenny, on the island of Grand Bruan. And now it was Laura Lesperitt.
But what I did tell Liz was also the truth. “A sword jockey who lets someone riding with him get killed, and then doesn’t do anything about it, won’t get much work after a while.”
“Is that the real reason?”
I grinned. “It’s a real reason.”
She shook my chin with playful annoyance. “Okay, so what’s our first move?”
“Hm. Well, I want to see where that farmer found me. Maybe there’s a clue left lying around. That house where they took us to torture the girl can’t be too far away.”
“It’s been over a week. By now they must know you’re not dead.”
“I know. But I have to start somewhere.”
“What can I do to help?”
“Other than what you just did?”
She grinned. “That helped us both.”
“If you feel like it, you could try to find out who else Argoset talks to, and what he’s really doing here. He’s looking into something, all right, but it’s not me. And if he wanted to frame me for the girl’s death, he would’ve done it already. He just wanted to scare me out of the way.”
She nodded. “I’ll ask around.”
“But watch yourself. This isn’t a simple thing.”
“I know. That’s why you need help with it.”
I turned and looked at her. The soft candlelight smoothed out her lines and made her look much younger: as young, in fact, as my memories of her twin sister, Cathy, over fifteen years ago. Soon I’d have to tell Liz that story, because it hung over us like a sword only one of us could see.
But not at that moment. At the moment I only had to kiss her again.
chapter
THREE
I
t grew easier to move around the more I did it, so it made sense to keep doing it. The next day I went down to the livery stable to arrange for another horse. Liz had her office there, just as mine was above the tavern. Her delivery business was a one-wagon, one-woman operation, but she’d been so successful lately she’d considered hiring an additional person. I did not have that problem.
Before she left that morning, she kissed me while she thought I was still sleeping. Through my eyelashes I watched her stand in the doorway, her figure silhouetted against the gray dawn sky beyond. How had I landed a woman so beautiful? She was slender, with hips just wide enough she’d never be mistaken for a man and breasts that rose deliciously against the front of whatever she wore. She had a lithe way of moving, a natural grace that turned heads wherever she went. I felt a little tug somewhere inside, the way I used to when we first met. Back then it was because I was afraid something might take her away; now I feared something might do the same to me. Mortality is grand.
She descended the rickety steps attached to the outside of the building. I heard one of the town’s cats meow as Liz no doubt stopped to pet it. Then she was gone. I rested a little longer, then made myself get out of bed, clean up and face the day. I’d given the world a week and a half to arrange its nefarious plots against me, and now it was time for me to get to work untangling them. I no longer needed the bandage on my head, and could take a deep breath without pain. My hands, when I held them in front of me, remained steady.
After I dressed, I strapped on a sword for the first time since the ambush. I chose the Shadow Slasher III, a little light for my normal tastes, but since I wasn’t up to full strength, it seemed like a good choice. I felt a little nudge as the hilt tapped the bruise my Jackblade had left when I fell on it. For some reason this reactivated the anger that had lain dormant since my injury, and a surge of righteous energy shot through me. I burst out the door and down the stairs with the assurance that someone, eventually, was going to get their ass kicked.
“What the hell are you looking so damn happy about?” Mrs. Talbot said as I came around the corner of the building. Our landlady wore a shapeless dress too short for a woman her age, and her dull gray hair fell haphazardly around her plump, drink-veined face. She crouched on the edge of the porch and expertly sharpened a wicked-looking cleaver. “Did that whack on the head make you simple?”
“It just made me appreciate your beauty even more.”
She laughed the way a cat spits out hair. “Yeah, you’re simple now; that proves it.” Then she pulled a leaf from a nearby bush and split it with the cleaver into two paper-thin mirror images. She nodded in satisfaction.
“I should pay you to sharpen my swords,” I said, impressed.
“You can’t afford me,” she retorted, then went back inside. I headed for the livery stable.
I passed Ditch Street (actually Canal Street, but changed in common usage to more accurately reflect its character) and saw the former Lizard’s Kiss now completely closed and abandoned. The windows on both floors were shuttered and boarded over, and the welcoming awnings removed. Nothing moved around it. Had I seen it wrong? Had the red-scarved workers been moving things out of the building instead of into it? No, I was certain I’d seen at least one large covered piece of furniture carried inside by the sullen-looking laborers. I stood gazing at it for a long time, until someone bumped into me and brought me back to the moment. Yeah, it was odd, but I had enough mysteries to wrangle.
At one corner of the building a smaller door led into a separate, independent office. The much more tasteful shingle over it said Dumont Confidential Courier Service. The wagon was gone, which meant Liz was off making a delivery. As Neceda was the only port for this section of Muscodia, lots of things were shipped through it, providing Liz with a steady living. Considering my iffy career, that was a good thing.
Hank met me at the stable door with a sad, rueful shake of his head. He wore heavy boots and a leather blacksmith’s apron. Most blacksmiths wouldn’t work in the same barn as the horses, but Hank had a way with the animals that kept them from panicking at the noise and burning smells. The ends of his long ragged hair were singed from stray sparks. “Helluva thing to happen to a good horse,” he said ruefully. “Helluva thing.” He clapped me hard on the shoulder. My ribs reminded me of their existence, and I winced. “Oh, sorry, Mr. LaCrosse. I thought you were well.”
“I’m fine,” I grunted. “The hospital told me my saddle and bridle and other stuff got dropped off down here.”
“ ‘Tack,’ Mr. LaCrosse. It’s called ‘tack.’ ”
“Guess I’m not very tackful, then.”
His expression didn’t change. “Well. Yes, the fella who took you to the hospital brought that stuff here on his way out of town, trying to sell it. I told him you were a friend, so he just left it. I’ve got it stored away. C’mon in here.”
I followed him past the stalls toward the little storage area at the back. The stable odor seemed especially strong after the hospital’s herb-flavored aroma. Seven horses were currently in residence, including a magnificent midnight-black stallion and an equally expensive white gelding. All regarded me with the same superior loathing every horse except Lola always had for me. Hank was right; she was a good horse. I realized suddenly how much I’d miss her.