There was another Atan runner waiting for them in Lebas with yet another message from Khalad. It was a fairly offensive note which suggested that the runner had been sent to guide them to the stretch of beach where Kring and Engessa waited with their forces, since if knights were left to their own devices in the forest, they would inevitably get lost. Khalad’s class prejudices were still quite firmly in place.
There was no road as such leading north from Lebas, but the trails and paths were quite clearly marked. They reached the southern edge of the vast forest that covered the northeastern quadrant of the continent, and the hundred Peloi Kring had brought with him from Eosia pulled in to ride very close to their allies. Deep woods made the plains-dwelling western Peloi very nervous.
‘I think it has to do with the sky,’ Tynian explained to the others.
‘You can barely see the sky when you’re in the deep woods, Tynian,’ Kalten objected.
‘Exactly my point,’ the broad-faced Deiran replied. ‘The western Peloi are accustomed to having the sky overhead. When there are tree-limbs blocking their view of it, they start to get nervous.’
They were never able to determine if the attempt was random or was deliberately aimed at Betuana. They were a hundred leagues or so into the forest and had set up their night’s encampment, and the large tent for the ladies – Betuana, Sephrenia, Xanetia and Flute – had been erected somewhat apart so that they might have a bit of privacy.
The assassins were well concealed, and there were four of them. They burst out of the thicket with drawn swords just as Betuana and Xanetia were emerging from the tent. Betuana responded instantly. Her sword whipped out of its sheath and plunged directly into the belly of one of the attackers. Even as she jerked the sword free, she dove to the ground, rolled and drove both feet full into the face of yet another.
Sparhawk and the others were running toward the tent in response to Sephrenia’s cry of alarm, but the Queen of the Atans seemed to have things well in hand. She parried a hasty thrust and split the skull of the shabby assailant who had made it. Then she engaged the remaining attacker.
‘Look out!’ Berit shouted as he ran toward her. The man she had felled with her feet was struggling to rise, his nose bleeding and a dagger in his hand. He was directly behind the Atan Queen.
Always before, when Xanetia had shed her disguise, the change had been slow, the concealing coloration receding gradually. This time, however, she flashed into full illumination, and the light within her was no mere glow. Instead, she blazed forth like a new sun.
The bloody-nosed assassin might have been able to flee from her had he been in full possession of his faculties. The kick he had received in the face, however, appeared to have rattled him and shaken his wits.
He did scream once, though, just before Xanetia’s hand touched him. His scream died in a hoarse kind of gurgle. With his mouth agape and his eyes bulging with horror, he stared at the blazing form of she who had just mortally wounded him – but only for a moment. After that, it was no longer possible to recognize his expression. The flesh of his face sagged and began to run down, turned by that dreadful touch into a putrefying liquid. His mouth seemed to gape wider as his cheeks and lips oozed down to drip off his chin. He tried to scream once, but the decay had already reached his throat, and all that emerged from his lipless mouth was a liquid wheeze. The flesh slid off his hand, and his dagger dropped from his skeleton clutch.
He sagged to his knees with the slimy residue of skin and nerve and tendons oozing out of his clothing.
Then the rotting corpse toppled slowly forward to lie motionless on the leaf-strewn floor of the forest – motionless, but still dissolving as Xanetia’s curse continued its inexorable course.
The Anarae’s fire dimmed, and she buried her shining face in her glowing hands and wept.
Chapter 28
It was raining in Esos, a chill, persistent rain that swept down out of the mountains of Zemoch every autumn. The rain did not noticeably dampen the Harvest Festival celebration, since most of the revelers were too drunk to even notice the weather.
Stolg was not drunk. He was working, and he had nothing but contempt for men who drank on the job. Stolg was a nondescript sort of fellow in plain clothing. He wore his hair cropped close, and he had large, powerful hands. He went through the crowd of revelers unobtrusively, moving toward the wealthier quarter of the city.
Stolg and his wife Ruta had argued that morning, and that always put him in a bad humor. Ruta really had little cause for complaint, he thought, stepping aside for a group of drunken young aristocrats. He was a good provider, after all, and their neat little cottage on the outskirts of town was the envy of all their friends. Their son was apprenticed to a local carpenter, and their daughter had excellent prospects for a good marriage. Stolg loved Ruta, but she periodically became waspish over some little thing and pestered him to death about it. This time she was upset because their cottage had no proper lock on the front door, and no matter how many times he told her that they, of all people, had no need of locks, she had continued to harp on the subject.
Stolg stopped and drew back into a recessed doorway as the watch tramped by. Djukta would normally have bribed the watch to stay out of Stolg’s way, but it was Harvest Festival time, so there would be plenty of confusion to cover any incidental outcries. Djukta was not one to spend money needlessly. It was a common joke in the seedier taverns in Esos that Djukta had deliberately grown his vast beard so that he could save the price of a cloak.
Stolg saw the house that was his destination and went into the foul-smelling alley behind it. He had arranged for a ladder to be placed against the back of the house, and he went up quickly and entered through a secondstory window. He walked on down the hallway and through the door into a bedroom. A former servant in the house had drawn a diagram and had pointed out the room of the owner of the house, a minor nobleman named Count Kinad. Once inside the room, Stolg lay down on the bed. As long as he had to wait, he might as well be comfortable. He could hear the sound of revelry coming from downstairs.
As he lay there, he decided to install the lock Ruta wanted. It wouldn’t be expensive, and the peace and quiet around the house would be more than worth it.
It was no more than half an hour later when he heard a heavy, slightly unsteady footfall on the stair. He rolled quickly off the bed, crossed silently to the door, and put his ear to the panel.
‘It’s no trouble at all,’ a slurred voice outside said. ‘I’ve got a copy in my bedroom.’
‘Really, Count Kinad,’ a lady’s voice called from below, ‘I take your word for it.’
‘No, Baroness, I want you to read his Majesty’s exact words. It’s the most idiotic proclamation you’ve ever seen.’ The door opened, and a man carrying a candle entered. It was the man who had been pointed out to Stolg two days ago. Stolg idly wondered what Count Kinad had done to irritate someone enough to justify the expense of a professional visit. He brushed the thought aside. That was really none of his business.
Stolg was a thorough professional, so he had several techniques available to him. The fact that Count Kinad’s back was to him presented the opportunity for his favorite, however. He drew a long poniard from his belt, stepped up behind the count, and drove the long, slim blade into the base of the count’s skull with a steely crunch. He caught the collapsing body and quietly lowered it to the floor. A knife-thrust in the brain was always certain, and it was quick, quiet, and produced a minimum of mess. Ruta absolutely hated to wash her husband’s work-clothes when there was blood all over them. Stolg set his foot between the count’s shoulders and wrenched his poniard out of the back of the skull. That was sometimes tricky. Pulling a knife out of bone takes quite a bit of strength.
Stolg rolled the body over and looked intently into the dead face. A professional always makes sure that a client has been permanently serviced.
The count was definitely dead. His eyes were blank, his face was turning blue, and a trickle of blood was coming out of his nose. Stolg wiped off his poniard, put it away, and went back out into the hallway. He walked quietly back to the window through which he had entered.
There were two more names on the list Djukta had given him, and with luck he could service another this very night. It was raining, however, and Stolg really disliked working in the rain. He decided to go home early instead and tell Ruta that he would give in just this once and install the lock she wanted so much. Then he thought it might be nice if they took their son and their daughter to the tavern at the end of the street to have a few tankards of ale with their neighbors. It was the Harvest Festival, after all, and a man should really try to spend the holidays with his friends and family.
Sherrok was a small, weedy sort of fellow with thinning hair and a lumpy skull. He did not so much walk as scurry through the crowded streets of Verel in southern Daconia. In the daytime, Sherrok was a minor official in the customs house, biting his tongue as he took orders from his Tamul superiors. Sherrok loathed Tamuls, and being placed in a subservient position to them sometimes made him physically ill. It was that loathing that had been primarily behind his decision to sell information to the diseased Styric Ogerajin, to whom a mutual acquaintance had introduced him. When Ogerajin, after a few carefully worded questions, had slyly hinted that certain kinds of information might be worth quite a bit of money, Sherrok had leaped at the chance to betray his despised superiors – and to make tidy sums as well.
The information he had for Ogerajin tonight was very important. The greedy, blood-sucking Tamuls were going to raise the customs rate by a full quarter of a percent. Ogerajin should pay handsomely for that piece of information.
Sherrok licked his lips as he rushed through the noisy crowds celebrating the Harvest Festival. There was an eight-year-old Astellian girl available at one of the slavemarts, a ravishing child with huge, terrified eyes, and if Ogerajin could be persuaded to be generous, Sherrok might actually be able to buy her. He had never owned a child so young before, and the very thought of her made his knees go weak.
His mind was full of her as he passed a reeking alleyway, and so he was not really paying any attention – until he felt the strand of wire snap tight around his neck.
He struggled, of course, but it was really not much use. The assassin dragged him back into the alley and methodically strangled him. His last thought was of the little girl’s face. She actually seemed to be laughing at him.
‘You’re really more trouble than you’re worth, you know,’ Bersola said to the dead man sprawled in the bow of the rowboat. Bersola always talked to the men he had killed. Many of Bersola’s colleagues believed that he was crazy. Candor compels us to admit that they were probably right.
Bersola’s major problem lay in the fact that he always did things exactly the same way. He invariably stuck his knife into someone between the third and fourth ribs at a slightly downward angle. It was effective, though, since a knife thrust there absolutely cannot miss the heart. Bersola also never left a body lying where it fell. He had a compulsive sense of neatness which drove him to put the remains somewhere out of sight. Since Bersola lived and worked in the Daconian town of Ederus on the coast of the Sea of Edom, disposal was a simple matter. A short trip in a rowboat and a few rocks tied to the deceased’s ankles removed all traces. Bersola’s habit-driven personality, however, led him always to sink the bodies in the exact same place. The other murderers of Ederus made frequent laughing reference to ‘Bersola’s Reef’, a place on the lake-bottom supposedly piled high with sunken bodies. Even people who didn’t fully understand the significance of the phrase referred to Bersola’s Reef.
‘You went and did it, didn’t you?’ Bersola said to the corpse in the bow of the boat as he rowed out to the reef. ‘You just had to go and offend somebody. You’ve got nobody to blame but yourself for this, you know. If you’d behaved yourself, none of this would have happened.’
The corpse did not answer. They almost never did.
Bersola stopped rowing and took his bearings. There was the usual light in the window of Fanna’s Tavern on the far shore, and there was the warning fire on the rocky headlands on the near side. The lantern on the wharf protruding out from Ederus was dead astern. ‘This is the place,’ Bersola told the dead man. ‘You’ll have lots of company down there, so it won’t be so bad.’ He shipped his oars and crawled forward. He checked the knots on the rope that held the large rock in place between the dead man’s ankles. ‘I’m really sorry about this, you know,’ he apologized, ‘but it is your own fault.’ He lifted the rock – and the dead man’s legs – over the side. He held the shoulders for a moment. ‘Do you have anything you’d like to say?’ he asked.
He waited for a decent interval, but the dead man did not reply.
‘I didn’t really think you would,’ Bersola said. He let go of the shoulders, and the body slithered limply over the gunwale and disappeared into the dark waters of the lake.
Bersola whistled his favorite tune as he rowed back to Ederus.
Avin Wargunsson, Prince Regent of Thalesia, was in an absolute fury. Patriarch Bergsten had left Thalesia without so much as a by-your-leave. It was intolerable! The man had absolutely no regard for the Prince Regent’s dignity. Avin Wargunsson was going to be king one day, after all – just as soon as the raving madman in the north tower finally got around to dying – and he deserved some courtesy. People always ignored him! That indifferent lack of regard cankered the soul of the little crown prince. Avin was scarcely more than five feet tall, and in a kingdom absolutely awash with blond people a foot or more taller, he was almost unnoticeable. He had spent his childhood scurrying like a mouse out from under the feet of towering men who kept accidentally stepping on him because they refused to look down and see that he was there.
Sometimes that made him so angry that he could just scream.
Then, without even bothering to knock, two burly blond ruffians opened the door and rolled in a large barrel. ‘Here’s that cask of Arcian red you wanted, Avin,’ one of them said. The ignorant barbarian didn’t even know enough to use a proper form of address.
‘I didn’t order a barrel of wine,’ Avin snapped.
‘The chief of the guards said you wanted a barrel of Arcian red,’ the other blond savage declared, closing the door. ‘We’re just doing what we were told to do. Where do you want this?’
‘Oh, put it over there,’ Avin said, pointing. It was easier than arguing with them.
They rolled the barrel across the floor and set it up in the corner.