Chapter Twenty Six
Talen
Two of the Plain One's magn led Talen, Hatul, and Kug to a small room equipped with a table, a small hutch, and four upholstered chairs. Talen found it disconcertingly hospitable.
As if to further make the argument, one of the magn took three mugs and a jug from the hutch and poured water for them.
"Stay here," he said, and then both left them there.
The door lock clacked into place.
Hatul took up one of the mugs. "Almost cordial," he said, and took a sip. "Hm. Refreshing."
Talen shook his head. "Only a fool would drink anything they offer."
Kug dropped himself into one of the chairs and drank as well. "If they were going to kill us," he said, "they wouldn't need poison to do it."
Talen gave Kug a mild grin. "No, just a magn too-ready with his ax."
Kug shrugged.
Hatul raised his mug to Talen. "We have Rajen to thank for our lives, it seems. She claims to be no magicker… I think you know better?"
Talen had kept his intense anxiety and fear for Rajen's fate carefully submerged since she'd been taken away. Scorn for Hatul helped keep it down.
"No one sees secrets in others like a magn with secrets of their own."
The affronted innocence on Hatul's face was as deliberately assumed as Talen's casual lack of concern.
Kug put his mug down with a clank. "Come, Hatul. Enough. Your path's paved with stinkflower petals, and your boots reek of it."
Talen was gratified to see Hatul's smirk falter. "How so, Kug?"
"I've watched you at the Capful for over a year now. The fallen city guard. The drunkard." Kug's smile was full of fatigue. "The perfect drunk."
Talen understood. "Yes. Too perfect. Except when you weren't. You followed me, Hatul. I saw you from my window. Not a mark before, barely able to stand… then, sober as a stone."
Hatul spread his arms and smiled. "All right. Yes. The magn called Hatul is a role I play. A fiction I adopt when my true identity would be… conspicuous."
Talen put his hand on the pommel of mothersfather Kranlen's sword. "Who are you?"
Hatul shrugged. "Does it matter? I am with you." He looked at Kug. "I am with you."
Talen shook his head. "No. How is that good enough? You could be with the palace guard, for all we know!" He lifted the sword half a hand out of the scabbard. "Tell the truth, or I tell White Eyes' magn you're an imposter."
Kug said, "They already know, and they don't care. Deceiver's right, remember? Whatever that is." Kug raised his mug to Hatul. "And if he was with the guard, they would have followed us here, or used a messenger flite to signal back. Either way, this place would be a killing ground by now."
Talen knew he was right. Once the location of White Eyes' lair was known, the Alwardendyn would have it wiped out, ending the Plain One's criminal influence once and for all.
Talen let the sword fall back in its scabbard.
"I still don't trust you," he said to Hatul. "We can't trust you. We don't know whose interests you serve."
Hatul said, "I serve my own interests. As do you. As does Kug. And Rajen."
Kug said, "Talen. Listen. All right?"
"I'll listen to you."
"Fine. Look. From what I understand, Hatul learned Lama had Ranith at the Capful because you, Talen, did such a poor job of concealing that you'd figured it out yourself. This must be why I've never seen you throw bones or play at plates."
Talen didn't think that was fair.
"Circumstances—"
Kug held up a silencing palm.
"He didn't go to the guard. He didn't turn us in."
"Maybe he wanted the reward for himself."
"No." Kug seemed almost amused. "Listen, I say again. If he wanted the reward for himself, he could have pursued the killers. The magn is strong, and skilled." He said to Hatul, "That hold you had me in; that's something like what they use out on the Plains, to grapple. You've been trained."
Hatul's only acknowledgment was to raise and lower his eyebrows.
Talen saw curiosity cross Kug's face for a blink. Did he have some idea of Hatul's true identity?
"Instead," Kug turned back to Talen, "he brings us one of the killers. And he led us here.
"And," he sighed, "he kept his wits when I did not, and probably kept us all from being murdered back there."
Talen could not argue any of that. He had no objective reason to suspect Hatul of being anything other than an opportunist.
Strip away all their individual justifications, and none of them were that different.
Still.
"I don't like him." He looked at Hatul. "I don't like you."
Hatul shrugged. "I've worked under worse conditions."
The door opened.
Rajen entered, followed by Sadek.
Relief urged Talen to go to her; to confirm she was all right. She seemed pale; less her typical defiantly certain self.
He held his place.
Rajen said, "They're… helping us. I've been given…" She cut herself off, scowled, and said quickly, "I know where they're keeping Ranith."
Her gaze wandered the room, a little aimlessly, as if she was following a buzzflite meandering through the air. She stopped on Talen.
Shaper's Hand, but he'd never seen her so distracted.
"What happened?"
She blinked, exhaled quickly, and seemed to find herself.
"We came to an arrangement."
Behind her, Sadek smiled broadly. "It's my understanding that haste is called for. Shall we set you on your way?"
Rajen
Sadek led Rajen and the rest to a large chamber in which an array of weapons and armor were laid out on several long tables overhung with bright glowglobes.
Talen sounded equally astounded and troubled. "You've got enough to equip a small army down here."
Sadek said, "As is appropriate." He stopped before a particular table, on which were displayed a mismatched variety of different hide and woven armor pieces. "The Plain One offers these to aid you in your endeavor."
Talen sent Rajen a skeptical look.
In Rajen's newly heightened perception, a thick, twitching thread of probability extended from Talen, and from the other two, and from Rajen herself. The four lines met in a ropy braid of scintillating color that flowed across, and beyond, the room, right through the wall.
The compulsion to follow it was urgent.
She had no patience for anything else.
"Just put on what suits, or fits, Talen. Make haste."
He was always quick to take offense. "No one's dawdling, Rajen."
Sadek said, "Additionally, the Plain One has selected three magn to accompany you. They are," he glanced at Rajen and Talen with barely convincing apology, "very skillful."
Kug stopped lacing up the woven reed breastplate he'd selected.
"No."
Hatul looked up from the piecemeal selection of armor. He regarded Kug for a beat, then said to Sadek, "Is this offering compulsory?"
Kug stepped up to an impassive Sadek. The tavernkeeper's probability stream writhed and curved along with him.
"I'm not fighting alongside any of you gutter butchers."
Sadek did not flinch. "Your companion can explain why accepting this offer is in everyone's best interest."
They all looked at Rajen.
Easy as focusing on the far wall, she extended her perceptions down the probability braid, which remained a weave of four threads, and only four threads, at least as far as their destination.
"We'll do without," she said.
Sadek stroked his chin. "You see it as such?"
Rajen nodded, thinking.
If the Plain One offered them magn, but those magn weren't represented in her perception by even the faintest of threads… did that mean White Eyes was as blind to the streams as the streams were repulsed by White Eyes?
Is that why they needed her?
Sadek shrugge
d. "That's how it will be, apparently."
Kug gave a curt nod to Sadek and returned to equipping himself.
Talen had donned a thick leather tunic embedded with the palm-sized bony plates of some dead beast. It was too big for him.
"Rajen," he said, "you need some kind of protection."
"Look to yourself," she said.
"But—"
"There's no animal skin that will protect me from the weapon I'll face."
"Ah." He nodded and sighed. "Right."
Hatul efficiently checked the fasteners and straps of the jointed, plated shirt he'd selected. "Are we ready?"
Affirmative indications all around.
"This way, then," Sadek said.
More tunnels, up a ladder in a narrow chute, and through a hatch that put them in a copse of trees through which Tah's late morning light filtered.
The city wall loomed some distance behind them. Ahead, the terrain sloped down to a small, still estuary, where a simple boat was tied to a post.
Rajen blinked. The probability braid pulsed and tugged, and she swayed slightly.
Sadek said, "You'll take that boat to—"
Rajen sliced the air between them with the side of her hand. "No more delays. I know the way."
She let the braid pull her toward the boat.
Chapter Twenty Seven
Dennick
Dennick and an only slightly irritable Talen pushed the boat into the shallows and they all settled in. Dennick crouched on the forward thwart.
Kug said, “I want to try this,” and took up the oars before Dennick or anyone else could argue. The sellsong and the magicker—after the mysterious and conveniently advantageous meeting with White Eyes, Dennick would not assume Rajen was anything less—sat on the sternsheet, facing Kug.
Kug said, "Where are we going?"
Rajen's focus was somewhere over Dennick's shoulder. "That wooded island. There's a large… must be a large structure there. The braid leads straight to it."
Dennick wondered. "There's a manor there. It was abandoned for years."
"It's not abandoned anymore," Rajen said.
"I had… heard," Dennick said, "that a wealthy former scribe had taken up residence." He grunted a humorless laugh. "Since 'scribe' and 'wealth' are dichotomous, I had always intended to look into that…"
Talen snorted. "Just curious?"
Dennick favored him with a slow, enigmatic smile that was strictly for show. The closer they all got to the pending confrontation, the more Dennick had to struggle to keep his conflicting missions segregated in his mind.
Rajen directed Kug's strokes with economical gestures, left or right.
Kug asked her, "What are you seeing? How does it work?"
She continued to stare at some point in the middle distance.
"Probability."
"Like… chance?"
Her mouth turned down and she scowled, but despite her apparent disinclination to reply, she said, "Chance. Decision. Every possibility, for any given thing; there's a tracing line… a stream. The more likely, the stronger and brighter the stream, or thread."
Talen said, "You called it a braid, just now. I've never heard you use that."
"All our streams are woven together," she said, "at least to the island. To Taghesh."
This was fascinating to Dennick. The wisdom keepers of the Alliance had a variety of the Science, and so the idea of it was not foreign to him, but their magick was nothing like Rajen's particular discipline. "And then?"
Rajen shrugged. "Remains to be seen."
Humor?
"Wait," Talen said. "You can see the streams well enough to guide us right to this place… but after that, nothing?"
She nodded.
"Huh."
There was something sobering about that. Save Rajen's occasional murmuring instruction to Kug, the quartet was silent until they put ashore a few bits later on a thickly wooded bank.
Dennick leaped nimbly out of the boat and tied it to the gnarled trunk of a fallen tree. Time to play a gambit.
"We're going to meet resistance," he said. "For the sake of acting in concert, and given that I'm the only one with actual combat training—and I know you won't like this, Talen—I suggest I assume command."
It was Kug with the first protest. "I was watering the plains with the blood of bandits while you three were still kicking stones in the street. Before yesterday, Hatul, no one knew anything of you beyond your practiced uselessness."
"To which you, Kug," Dennick countered, "can attest otherwise."
Talen spoke up. "I will follow Kug. Not you."
Rajen strode past the three of them and up the bank. "Is this really such a challenge? Our path is clear; we don't need commanding." She stabbed a finger at Dennick. "Unsheathe the sword on your back and take point with me."
It made as much sense as anything he would have said. She had the magickal map in her head; he lacked Kug's potentially detrimental and grief-driven bloodlust.
"Let's go." He joined her up the bank.
Behind them, he heard Talen grouse, "We don't need commanding, says the magn giving the orders."
"Shut up now," Kug said.
Talen
Rajen led them through thick stands of trees with unerring and, to Talen, unnerving, certainty. Hatul kept just behind and to her left, scanning back and forth, squinting and focused.
Talen glanced at Kug. The older magn didn't notice. His eyes were on Rajen's back; his face a stiff scowl of anticipation. He held his heavy two-handed ax as easily as the broom Talen was more accustomed to seeing in his rough hands.
The blades of that double-bitted weapon were skystone, same as mothersfather Kranlen's sword. He wanted to ask Kug about it.
Not now.
Eventually.
He wondered if he should draw his sword. Hatul had not, so far, despite Rajen’s “command.”
So be it.
It was heavy, anyway.
Talen had not realized how heavy until he'd wielded it against Kug. Somehow the weight of impending combat lent heft to the blade.
He recognized the grim poetry in that. There was a song there.
Eventually.
The quartet crested a low hill. Ahead, Talen saw Rajen slap Hatul's shoulder. They stopped, then hunched down. Talen and Kug exchanged a look, then crouch-walked up the slope to join them.
Their destination was nestled in the vale below.
The manor was a sprawling single-story log-and-plank structure. Talen had never seen such a large wooden building. Even if the timber was harvested from the island, which it must have been, it represented an extravagant expense.
There were two outbuildings, a stable, and a livestock barn. A few yardflites strutted around on the cleared earth.
There was nothing to indicate that this was the lair of the most infamous magicker in Aenikantag.
Then, three magn in grey traveling cloaks emerged from the stable, each leading trim riding hoppers. On one magn's shoulder crouched a spindly messageflite. As Talen watched, it turned its long, horn-crested head in their direction, opened its pointed beak, and emitted a low chirrup.
Its magn stopped dead and turned their head to trace the target of the messageflite's attention.
Talen held his breath.
The magn said something to his companions, then lifted his arm. The messageflite flapped into the air and soared over Talen's head, back toward the mainland.
Talen was fairly sure the four of them were well concealed, given the shaded tree trunks and their higher elevation. All the same, that magn appeared to be looking right at them.
As the other two mounted their hoppers, the magn gesticulated up at the quartet, tracing a wide oval in the air he then punctuated with a fist in the center.
Hatul whispered, "The Plain One's sigil."
The magn pantomimed washing his hands, shook them of imaginary water, and mounted his own hopper.
With one more pointed look up the hill at Talen and his
companions, the magn tapped his hopper's neck. All three turned and rode in the opposite direction, away from the compound and into the far woods.
Talen said, "What… what was that?"
Hatul said quietly to Kug, "What do you think?"
Kug's tone was thick with sardonic disappointment. "I think I was looking forward to burying my ax in some of the magn that murdered my sister's daughter, but apparently the Plain One's business with the magicker is concluded."
Hatul suggested mildly, as if the two were discussing the weather, "Or, it could be a trap. They could double back as we approach the house."
Kug exhaled through his nose. "There's no cover down there."
Talen felt like he should probably contribute. "There's three of them. Four of us."
For once, Hatul didn't sound like he was speaking down to him. "Three of them… on hoppers. That's a big advantage."
Kug said, "A kick in the gut is a slow way to die."
From the look in his eyes, Talen guessed Kug had witnessed it.
"Ah."
Rajen shook her head. "If you're concerned over what might happen next," she said, "perhaps you should consult the one magn among us who can actually tell you."
They looked at her.
"I've already said. The braid goes into the house."
Talen needed a little more. "So…"
"Talen. So whether the Plain One's magn are setting a trap or not—and only an idiot would think they are, at this point—all four of us get into the house."
Hatul said, "Or at least… that outcome is strongly favored. Correct?"
She gave him a level look. "Like fire is hot."
Hatul nodded. "All right." He drew his sword. "Kug. With me?"
Kug nodded. Before he and Hatul moved to descend into the vale, Hatul said to Talen, "Time to bring out that fancy blade, sellsong."
Rajen followed them down.
This was it.
"Mothersfather," Talen whispered as he pulled the gleaming skystone blade from its scabbard, "be with me."
The weapon was heavy.
Chapter Twenty Eight
Kug
Now that the Plain One's thugs had departed, the manor grounds were empty and still. Kug and Hatul led Rajen and Talen right up to the tall, heavy front door.
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