The Inquisitives [3] Legacy of the Wolves
Page 23
Surprisingly, the lycanthrope did not take the opportunity to attack, instead turning its bloody muzzle back toward Chardice, who raised her arms up, as if in welcome.
But that was insane. She was so ill, so weak from blood loss, she must be trying to defend herself, and just didn’t have the strength to do more than gesture feebly.
Surely she wasn’t, couldn’t be … encouraging the foul beast?
Andri clambered back to his feet, kicking the quilts aside as he approached the werewolf again, more cautiously this time.
“Get off my mother, you Flame-cursed abomination!”
That seemed to get the creature’s attention. It snarled at him and stepped away from the bed, shaking scarlet drops of Chardice’s blood from its snout as it did so. The werewolf set itself in a ready stance, knees bent slightly as it prepared for Andri’s next charge. It raised its clawed hands up in what Andri at first assumed was a defensive gesture, but he soon realized that it was the beginning of an arcane pass, one that seemed strangely familiar.
The werewolf was trying to cast a spell on him!
As it thrust one palm out toward him, Andri dove to one side, rolling and coming up on his heels a few feet away. He expected to feel the tingle of magic passing over him as he tumbled out of the way, but there was nothing. Standing, he saw that the werewolf was staring at his hand with an oddly canine expression of frustration and disbelief.
The lycanthrope began the pass again, and Andri recognized the motions this time. It was one of his father’s own favorites, a ball of fire tinged with silver and imbued with holy power. But the werewolf’s magic didn’t seem to be working.
Whatever the reason, Andri took the lapse for the boon it was and pressed his own attack. As the lycanthrope tried again and again to call the fire into being, Andri moved in. He feinted toward the werewolf’s hands. As the creature drew away to protect them, Andri crouched low, reversing his stroke and slicing at the lycanthrope’s knees, which had been his true target all along. Only the beast’s preternatural speed allowed it to avoid the blow, as it danced back just out of reach of the silver blade.
Andri had been prepared for that, though. Uncoiling, he sprang forward, bringing the tip of his father’s sword up and scoring a long gash along the werewolf’s abdomen. The creature whirled away, clutching at the wound with one hand, while Andri positioned himself so that he stood between it and the bed.
The werewolf brought its hand up, staring at its own blood curiously. It looked at Andri and grinned again, then thrust its tongue out between its fangs and lapped up the scarlet liquid as if it were water. Andri could not suppress a shiver of revulsion.
There was a hissing noise behind him and Andri risked a glance over his shoulder. Miraculously, his mother, awash in her own blood, was still alive. She was trying to speak, but all that came out of her ruined throat were breathy gasps.
When she saw she had attracted his attention, she tried to lift her too-pale hand and beckon to him. Andri half-turned toward her in spite of himself, unable to deny his mother’s call.
It was a mistake.
He saw movement out of the corner of his eye, but before he could react, the werewolf hit him square in the midsection, sending the young man hurtling over his mother’s bed where he landed facedown with a sickening splat on the eviscerated body of Inulda, his mother’s halfling nurse.
Gagging, Andri scrambled away, swiping at his face with both hands to get the woman’s blood and bits of her masticated flesh off his skin.
His back against the far wall of the bedroom, Andri looked about wildly for his father’s sword, knowing he was doomed without it. It lay where it had fallen, near the foot of his mother’s bed. The werewolf ignored both the sword and him as it turned back to the priestess.
The creature reached out one claw, stroking her cheek in a lover’s caress. It trailed its claws down across the shredded flesh of her throat to her sternum. Its hand hovered there, over the hollow between her breasts.
Andri crawled slowly toward the foot of the bed, each measured movement a torment as he prayed that the creature would disregard him, while every fiber of his being screamed at him to hurry! But he knew his only chance lay in a surprise attack from behind—a blow that would destroy any hope he had of becoming a paladin. Followers of the Silver Flame did not stab their enemies in the back, no matter how abhorrent those enemies were, or how vile their crimes.
So be it. For all he cared, the attack could consign him to eternal damnation in the pits of Khyber. Just so long as it kept that detestable thing from defiling his mother.
What seemed like hours later, he finally felt his hand close around the hilt of his father’s sword. He stood, grasping the hilt in two fists. Then, with a roar of rage he could no longer contain, he lunged and drove the blade into the werewolf’s back, just as it began to dig its claws into his mother’s chest, reaching for her heart.
Howling in agony, the lycanthrope collapsed onto the bed, covering Chardice’s body with its own.
Pulling the sword free, Andri rushed to the side of the bed and heaved the werewolf’s body off his mother, unable to stand the thought of it touching her. As the lycanthrope fell to the floor, it began to change, its fur retracting to leave smooth, tanned flesh and the bones of its face reforming themselves into a familiar, and much beloved, countenance.
“Andri …” his father managed, then he coughed once and his eyes went dark. And Alestair Aeyliros, famed lycanthrope hunter, was dead, slain by his own son, with his own blade.
“No,” Andri whispered, shaking his head in horror, even as all the clues fell into place. His father’s sword. His path of destruction. The full moon shining in the bedroom window. “No, no, no, no, no!”
He sank to the floor beside his father’s body, fighting back tears.
Andri had begged his father to see a priest after he returned from the Burnt Wood, but Alestair had stubbornly insisted that he was fine. The chances of the werewolf he killed there being a natural-born were so slim as to be nonexistent, his father had said, and, since infected lycanthropes hadn’t been able to infect others with their curse since the Purge, he had nothing to worry about. Besides, he’d chewed belladonna as soon as he’d killed the creature, just as a precaution. The pyromancer had laughed at Andri for worrying.
And now he was dead, after having killed at least five people himself.
Oh, Father.
There was a sound from the bed, and Andri looked up in amazement.
Not five. Not yet.
He left his father’s corpse and went to his mother’s side. Her face was white—so white—and her lips were turning blue. Her hand, when he grasped it, was already cool.
But, somehow, she was still with him, still hanging on. Still trying to speak to him, to give him one last message before she died.
Andri bent close to hear her.
“Is … dead?” she wheezed, her eyes wandering and unfocused.
“Yes, Mother. But … but …” He couldn’t bring himself to tell her who her attacker had been. But as she looked up at him, her eyes cleared, and he realized she already knew.
“Good. Now … kill … me.”
Andri drew back, appalled.
“What? What are you saying, Mother? Why? I can’t—”
“Andri!” she said, the forceful tone costing her as blood began to trickle from the corner of her mouth. “Have … to. Can’t risk … what he did.”
“No. No!” His tone was pleading, whining even. He didn’t care.
She couldn’t be asking him to do this. She couldn’t.
“Use … sword.”
“No! I won’t. I can’t!”
Chardice drew in a shuddering breath.
“You will … if … love me.”
“I’ll find the belladonna, I’ll get a priest, anything! Just not this. Anything but this!”
His mother’s eyes filled with tears.
“Don’t send … soul to Flame … with this stain. Please.”<
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She had always ruled his life with a velvet glove of guilt, and Andri had never been able to deny her anything.
Now was no exception.
With a leaden heart, he bent to pick up his father’s sword. Then, his eyes caught in his mother’s gaze, he plunged the silver blade into her chest.
She gasped once, a small sound of pain. Then she looked up at him, smiled, and died.
He was still standing there, his hands wrapped around the hilt, when a pair of guards came pounding into the room, swords drawn. One of them, a new recruit he’d done some training with, took one look at the carnage and vomited all over the floor.
The other leveled his weapon at Andri.
“Drop the sword.”
Numbly, Andri did as he was bade. He’d driven the blade into his mother’s body so hard that it pinned her to the bed, and stood quivering once he’d released it.
“Now back away. Slowly.”
Andri complied, raising his hands to show he meant no harm.
“Stick out your hands.”
He did so, his grief-fogged mind not immediately comprehending why they were clapping manacles on his outstretched wrists.
“Andri Aeyliros, in the name of the Keeper, you are under arrest. For murder.”
They thought he was the murderer.
And as they led him away, he cast one look back at the bodies of his mother and father, and realized they weren’t wrong.
Chapter
SEVENTEEN
Wir, Eyre 4, 998 YK
As Andri trailed off into silence, Irulan and Greddark sat stunned by the paladin’s story. Irulan found herself swallowing hard as she tried to imagine how awful it must have been for him. She knew how it felt to have both of your parents die. She’d experienced it herself and had seen its effects on Javi. The grief, the resentment, the constant second-guessing yourself, always wondering if it was somehow your fault, if they might still be alive if only you’d done something different. But to know it was your fault, because they died at your own hand? She didn’t know how Andri could bear it.
“So what happened?” the dwarf asked, his voice rough. Though he didn’t show it, Irulan was certain Andri’s tale had affected the inquisitive as deeply as it had her.
Andri looked up from the fire, his eyes haunted. He shrugged. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse.
“Obviously, they let me go. They realized I was telling the truth—it simply isn’t possible to lie to the Inquisitors.”
The paladin gave a short, humorless laugh. The irony of a lycanthrope killer being subjected to the same tortures that the lycanthropes had themselves faced during the Purge was not lost on him.
“I wish I could have lied, that it had all been some mad delusion. But it was all completely and horribly true. My father infected with lycanthropy and unable to fight the curse when the moon turned full again. Him killing all those people on his way to get to my mother. Me having to kill him to protect her, and then …”
His face contorted, but the paladin quickly mastered himself and continued, staring blankly into the flames once more.
“But even though the Keeper vouched for me, some people still believed I was—am—a murderer. My parents were extremely wealthy, and people began whispering that I’d just used my father’s rampage as an excuse to get rid of them both and gain my inheritance. Even so many years later, those rumors still haunt me. People talk about me behind their hands as I pass, and some don’t bother with whispering. But the Flame knows the truth—the Flame, and the Keeper, and now you. I can ask for nothing more.”
Andri stood.
“I’ll take the first watch. I wouldn’t want to sleep now even if I could.”
As Irulan watched him disappear into the darkness, the lump in her throat threatened to choke her. Warm wetness cascaded down her cheeks and she realized she was crying. As she tried to dash the offending moisture away, she snuck a glance at Greddark, whose own eyes sparkled in the firelight before he turned away.
The only one who had no tears for the paladin, it seemed, was Andri.
They left the ruins of Shadukar the next morning and headed south into the Burnt Wood. It had once been called the Flamewood, before the Jewel of the Sound had been sacked, but when the Karrns set Shadukar to the torch, they’d also burned the forest from which the city drew many of its resources. Though the trees had started to grow back, and the undergrowth was green and healthy, the skeletons of pines still clustered about the forest edge, like an undead Karrnathi garrison left behind to finish off anyone with the temerity to return.
“So now we’re looking for a whole pack of lycanthropes hiding out in the woods. How big did you say this forest was, again?”
Greddark frowned as he said it, glaring at a tree branch that had scratched his cheek while he was trying to duck under another.
“The Burnt Wood stretches from Angwar Keep to Shadukar, and from Olath nearly to the mouth of the Thrane River,” Andri replied. It was the first thing he’d said since last night’s revelations. If you didn’t count the Nine Miracles of the Silver Flame—the long version. Three times. Irulan had finally relieved Greddark of his watch early, since there was no way she was going to get any sleep with the paladin’s incessant praying.
“That’s what, nearly a hundred miles? And probably half that across? So, basically, five thousand square miles,” the dwarf said, figuring the area in his head. “And we’re supposed to find a pack of werewolves in here—a pack which, presumably, doesn’t want to be found?” He barked out a short laugh. “I’d say that’s like looking for a specific blade of grass on the Talenta Plains, but I think I’d prefer those odds.”
Irulan thought she might have a way to improve Greddark’s odds, but they weren’t deep enough into the forest yet. She led them further in, following a faint game trail, her mare for once tractable and easy to handle. Perhaps the animal sensed Irulan’s relief at being back underneath a green canopy, sunlight dappling her path and birdsong guiding her steps. She was only ever truly comfortable in the wild, which was why she stayed away from Aruldusk—and Javi—so often. The thought brought a familiar twinge of guilt. Perhaps if she’d made the effort to stick around more, Javi would not now be pacing a five by five cell, unable even to see the open sky she loved so much.
Or perhaps, she thought with more than a hint of annoyance, she’d been spending far too much time around Andri.
Returning her attention to the forest around her, Irulan let the reins go slack as she concentrated on the rhythms of life that pulsed all around her. She opened up her senses, accessing the animal instincts left to her by her lycanthropic forebears. Her sight and hearing sharpened, and her sense of smell became so acute that she winced when the wind shifted and she caught the scents of her companions and their mounts. The faintest hint of lavender still clung to Andri, but dirt and sweat predominated, producing a musky, masculine odor that made Irulan’s nose twitch. Greddark, on the other hand, just plain stank.
Beyond them, the fresh scents of spring flowers and new grass, the wet, earthy smell of moss, the too-sweet aroma of moldering leaves and decay. The buzz of insects, the muted scratch of animals burrowing underground, the hiss of scales on bark as a snake wound its way towards an unsuspecting squirrel.
There, in the hollow of that large oak, an owl slept, waiting for nightfall. A clearing, far to her right, held a doe and her fawn, lapping water from a sluggish creek. Over to her left, a mass of hollow rock that could only be a cave. Inside, a great bear, dozing after a meal of rich honey and tart berries.
And there, ahead. What she’d been searching for.
Wolves.
Five … no, six. Four males, two females. But big, too big for normal wolves, or even lycanthropes.
Dire wolves.
Hunting.
They hadn’t scented her small pack yet, but they would.
The only question was, would it be before or after they made their kill?
“Irulan? Are you well?”
“I’m fine. Just trying to figure out the best path to our destination.”
Greddark cocked one bushy brow at her. “Our destination? You almost make it sound as if you know where we’re going.”
She smiled at him, baring her teeth. “No, but I know who might.”
“You want to do what?”
Irulan sighed. For an inquisitive, Greddark was pretty slow on the uptake.
“Look,” she said. “They’re wolves, and territorial. They’ll know where any other pack is lairing, including the werewolves. It shouldn’t be too—”
“Dire wolves, didn’t you say? About as big as my horse? Six of them? On the hunt?” Greddark turned to Andri. “She’s lost her mind.”
The paladin just shrugged. He’d been withdrawn and taciturn all morning. As irritating as his fervent prayers had been, his silence bother Irulan even more. She knew the memories he’d dredged up the night before still plagued him, and his pain was palpable.
All the more reason for them to go after the wolves—or, rather, have the wolves come after them. A fight would do the paladin good.
“I’m not crazy. They’ll think we’re easy prey—”
“And they won’t be wrong,” Greddark muttered, but she ignored him.
“—and try to attack. We defeat their pack leaders, and they’ll have no choice but to help us.”
“Pack leaders? As in, more than one?”
Honestly. Had he never been out of the city?
“Two. The dominant male and female. Usually the parents of the other wolves.”