Covenant's End (8 page)

She felt Olgun's presence, of course, as she always did, but she could take no comfort in it. No, not so; she perversely
would
take no comfort in it, refusing to acknowledge his gentle but insistent tug. She could not let herself be soothed by anyone else—not even a god—who relied on her. It felt wrong. Dishonest.

Water on cobbles and mud
between
cobbles sprayed from beneath her heel with every heavy step. Frigid as it was, she welcomed the predawn rain, even yanking her collar loose so it could wash over her neck, her shoulders, her back, as well as through her hair, across the upturned face she aimed stubbornly at the clouds.

It felt clean. Smelled clean. It was the only thing tonight that had.

She stood, still, soaking, letting her thoughts run away in rivulets like the dirt of her journeys. Until, when it was already so close that any enemy could have done her serious harm, she heard the splashing steps of someone's approach.

Her rapier had cleared the scabbard up to the tip before Shins realized precisely who she was looking at.

“You have a
lot
of gall,” she spat at the other woman, whose own blonde hair was now plastered flat to her scalp and shoulders. “What the hopping hens do
you
want?”

“You actually do say that,” Faustine marveled. “I thought she was exaggerating.”

“Why didn't you warn me she was coming?” Shins hissed at Olgun while waiting for the woman to say something that actually mattered. The little god, who'd been trying to get her attention for some time now, huffed off to go grumble in some metaphysical corner.

“Look, Shins…”

“No. Uh-uh. Nope. Only friends get to call me that.”

The small cascade of water shifted as Faustine raised an eyebrow. “Because ‘Widdershins' is so much more formal?” Then, when Widdershins refused to respond, “Can we at least go back inside to talk?”

“Feel free.”

Faustine sighed, a sound stolen away by the weather long before it could reach anyone. “Widdershins, you…we think you may be in danger.”

“And you came to bask in it, yes?”

“Oh, gods dammit! Robin's angry! She's in awful pain, body and soul. But she wouldn't want you to be hurt, and you know it!”

“Do I?” She'd meant it as a challenge, but it emerged a plea.

“Of course you do. Robin loves you, Widdershins. Your leaving couldn't have hurt her so badly if she didn't.”

Shins nodded dumbly. Though still unwilling to go back inside the Witch, she at least stepped into the doorway of a building across the way, motioning Faustine to follow. The overhang couldn't keep the rain completely off them, but it was better than nothing.

“And why do
you
care if I get hurt?” she asked. No challenge or confusion, this time, just honest curiosity.

“Because she does.”

A second, firmer nod. “She doesn't know you came after me, does she?”

“No. And she'll be upset when I come back soaked. But she
would
have thought of this, if she was clear-headed, and she'd have wanted you to know.”

“All right. I'm listening.”

“Your friend Renard?”

Shins couldn't quite hold back a crooked half-smile, thinking of the strutting, peacock-ish fop of a thief. So full of himself, yet the most stalwart friend and mentor—well, former mentor—she could have asked…

The smile fell as though the rain had washed it off her face. “What about him? Did something happen?”

Faustine actually took Shins's hand in her own; the thief stiffened but forced herself not to pull away. “We don't know,” she admitted. “He always came by the Witch regularly. Said it was just because he could drink for cheap, but Robin and I both knew he was checking up on her.

“Couple of months ago, he came by, fretting like I've never seen him. He told us something was wrong. Something in the Finders' Guild.”

Ah. Funny how they keep popping up, yes?

“He didn't say much,” Faustine continued, “just told us to start being extra careful. Said things were getting rough, and he didn't know how much he could protect us.

“That was the last time he came by with any regularity, Widdershins. And he hasn't shown up at all in weeks. We figured, you've
already
had problems with the Guild in the past, so with gods-know-what going on…”

Shins had to swallow twice before she could answer, clearing her fear for Renard from her throat. “Thank you,” she said, only slightly grudgingly. “I…don't suppose you know what he meant by ‘getting rough'?”

“He didn't say specifically,” the other woman answered. “But between Robin's place at the tavern and my job—I'm a local courier—we both hear things. Lots of things.

“There's a lot going wrong in Davillon right now, and part of that is the Finders' Guild. They've gotten brutal. Vicious. And overt enough that everyone's scared. I mean, they were always dangerous, but now it's like they're shedding blood for the
fun
of it!”

Shins pulled free of Faustine's grip and began to pace—which, given the size of the canopy, meant basically one big step in each direction. It was a testament to how distracted she was that she didn't start to feel really, really foolish.

“Doesn't make any sense,” she muttered, a sentiment to which Olgun could only vehemently agree. “What's the Shrouded Lord thinking?”

A particular doubt took root in her mind, planted by divine effort, and blossomed.

“You think so?” Then, answering herself before he could, “You may be right. I can't imagine why he'd change so much, but if he's not in control anymore…. But who in the Guild would be so…?”

So completely, so abruptly did Widdershins freeze that Faustine jumped. The cold, the wet, the world, even the deep ache of Robin's reaction to her homecoming, all of it was gone. There was nothing for Shins, nothing around her, nothing
to
her.

Nothing but a gaping darkness and a slowly growing ember of pure, murderous hate.

Robin's wound was a message. A message for Widdershins.

The wound in Robin's
upper thigh.

And the Guild had turned suddenly sadistic, brutal…

“Who attacked Robin?”

Shins didn't know what she sounded like, but it couldn't have been pleasant; Faustine actually retreated a step. “Wh-what?”

“The attacker. The one who stabbed her. Who was it?”

“We…we don't know…”

“
Describe her!
”

Faustine squeaked something only marginally intelligible. Then, “It was a woman! She was fast, so impossibly fast! We didn't…I couldn't see her face, not in her hood, but her hair was an almost brilliant red…. Wait. How did you know it was a ‘her'?”

But Shins was no longer listening to anything but the voices in her head, her own and Olgun's both.

Lisette.

She had wondered, on and off. After the men she'd had to kill in Castle Pauvril—not in self-defense, as she'd done before, but coldly,
deliberately, for a greater good—the guilt had almost crushed her. And though she'd hoped she didn't have it in her at all, she'd wondered, idly, in the days that followed, what it might take for her to kill, to
murder
, without remorse.

Now, she knew. Now, Widdershins not only
could
kill, she swore she
would
.

And just this once, she would revel in it.

The weather had finally—if only partly—cleared, sometime around midmorning. The rain deteriorated into a soupy fog, the kind that, though more subtle than any precipitation, still managed to soak through and moisten just about everything.

It was more than enough to prevent Widdershins's drenched clothes and hair from drying out, and she was starting to feel a bit chafed. She could only imagine how bedraggled she must appear; probably looked like a drowned scarecrow.

Still, cleaning up and changing remained out of the question. She'd been halfway to one of her other boltholes after her talk with Faustine when several questions, previously held at bay by shock and anger, had finally returned to her mind. Questions that Olgun not only couldn't begin to answer but that—judging by the radiating waves of shame—he felt should have occurred to him earlier, too.

“How…? Olgun, how…?”

The words chewed through her mind, even if they refused to reach her throat.
How had Lisette known of her connection to Alexandre?!

The Taskmaster had been present during the Apostle's rampage, if not particularly involved. Could she have heard something? Something linking Widdershins to Adrienne Satti, the girl she once was?

But then, if Lisette knew that, why not spread the word? She'd have a lot more people looking for Shins, that way.

“Okay,” she breathed. “We'll come back to that.” Mostly because if she remained focused on it now, she might just panic. “Let's look at more practical stuff.”

Practical stuff such as…
Leaving alone the question of how she'd found the various boltholes, how in the name of Banin's backside had Lisette known
which
of them we'd use when she returned? Even
I
didn't know! How had she known where to leave the bod—Alexandre?

That Lisette was, indeed, the one responsible, Widdershins never questioned. The timing and the sheer inhuman cruelty of the act both fit too well. Their first question, in turn, had led god and worshipper both to another, even more awful.

What if she
hadn't
known which apartment to pick?

Shins had immediately changed course, crossing half the length of Davillon. First to a smaller cemetery, where the Guard buried their own when no family plot or crypt awaited. Then here, to a much larger graveyard, on whose winding paths Shins had walked so many times.

The plot was unrecognizable when she finally reached it. The many flowers and flourishing vines, growing things that never faded in even the harshest winters thanks to Olgun's divine touch, had been ripped from their roots and left to rot. The stone itself was defaced, cracked across the front by some sort of hammer or heavy blow. And, just like the grave of Julien Bouniard—the reason she'd gone to the smaller cemetery that morning—this one wore a thick layer of soil clearly fresher and far more recent than it should be.

As though the burial had occurred weeks ago, not well over a year.

The desecration, too, appeared roughly that old. The interior of the broken stone remained bright and relatively clean; those portions of dead foliage that hadn't rotted or blown completely away were slowly decomposing into soggy sludge.

Shins knelt beside the grave, her knee sinking into the mud with a sort of
squelch
. She carefully lifted the rotting remains of what had been a lush rose, held it briefly in her palm before squeezing shut her fist and letting it dribble between her fingers. Even the rage she'd been stoking had faded, leaving nothing but an empty, numbing chill.

“Olgun? Groundskeeper?”

She felt a faint tug, nodded, and rose to follow.

He wasn't that hard to find, though; Shins probably could have managed it without Olgun's hints. Opposite the main gate, the cemetery's far end had been recently expanded. The earth still showed a few open wounds where the walls had been partly dismantled and moved, and whole rows of graves were obviously fresh. The caretaker—for that is what Shins assumed the ashen-haired older man in the beat-up woolens to be—leaned wearily on a spade and watched a band of workers digging up yet another new plot some yards distant. Shins didn't envy them their task, not with the earth both drenched by the weather and packed down hard by so many feet over the past weeks. The scent of loam in the air was so thick, Shins was surprised it didn't disturb the occupants.

She made no effort to conceal her approach, and the groundskeeper turned to greet her at the sound of her footsteps. “What can I do for you, madamois—?”

“The Marguilles grave. What happened to it?”

“Happened? I'm afraid I don't know what—”

Widdershins heaved a sigh so deep, it could itself have come from one of the coffins. “Are we really going to do this? Genevieve Marguilles was my friend. I've been to her graveside more times than you could count without undressing. So spare me the fake ignorance, yes?”

Straightening to his full height, he scowled down at her. “As we're digging so many new plots,” he said primly, “we decided to take the opportunity to touch up a few of the older ones, where time and weather had begun to—”

“The face-saving cover story now? What, do you have a checklist to run through? Just tell me the truth, for figs' sake!”

“Stop interrupting! Mademoiselle, I don't know where you learned your manners—”

“Her body's missing, isn't it? Someone dug her up. And this cemetery's not the only place it happened.”

The panic in the old man's eyes and the brief stammer before he could manage an indignant “I've never heard such nonsense!” were more than evidence enough.

“Thanks,” she called as she began to walk away. She'd covered perhaps three or four paces when he called out to her.

“Mademoiselle, wait!” Although tempted to ignore him, she stopped long enough for him to catch up. “Please,” he said, hoarse and quiet. “I've no idea how you found out, but you
can't
tell anyone! Everyone's scared and upset enough as it is. If word of
this
should spread…”

“How bad
are
things?” she asked. Then, at his baffled look, “I'm only just back in town.” She waved a hand at the new expansion. “Frankly, and no offense, but yours isn't a business I like to see thriving.”

It was his turn to sigh, that peculiar mix of exasperation and sorrow that only people old enough to speak seriously of the “good old days” could muster. “Crime's gotten awful, the Guard can't handle it, and the house soldiers ‘helping keep the peace' are sparring with political rivals as much as anyone else. I've never seen the like. And that's not even counting…”

“Counting what?” she prodded when it became clear he had no plans to continue.

“Oh, the usual rumors. Sort you get every time there's civil unrest. Only, well, there's an awful
lot
of them this time.”

Teeth grinding in her impatience, she prodded again. “Rumors of?”

“Well, some folks are saying that there's something
supernatural
stalking the streets. Lot like it was last summer…”

Olgun gibbered something that even Shins found incomprehensible.

“Uh, thanks,” Shins said again to the groundskeeper, then broke into a steady jog, headed for the gate. She swiftly left the old man behind, shouting after her not to tell anyone.

“Yeah,” she muttered, “
that's
a good way to keep a secret.”

More frightened blather from her god.

“Oh, calm down! It's just another of Lisette's tricks. Taking advantage of something she knows frightens people. Vile, nasty frog of a woman. I should have killed her the first time.”

Quivering, almost childish uncertainty.

“Well, maybe it is. But even if she found a way to summon something, it still starts and ends with her. This is
not
going to be like Iru—like before.”

Olgun didn't sound—well, feel—convinced, but he let it drop. Instead, after Shins had cleared the gate and made an abrupt turn down a nearby road, he wafted a question across her mind.

“No!” She skidded to a halt, took a moment to catch her breath, which had abruptly grown sharp and ragged. “No,” she repeated, “we are not going anywhere
near
any of the flats. We already know what we're going to find there, and I can't…no. No place to sleep, and no
time
. You'll just have to keep me going until we're done.”

Perhaps she
was
being foolish, at that. Gods knew she could use some rest after the last couple of days, and while Lisette was no great threat one-on-one—Shins had full-well proven that once already—there was no telling how hard she might be to
get
to.

But Widdershins absolutely could not face the idea of returning to any of her boltholes. The thought of having to confront Gen or Julien, finding them in the same state as Alexandre…no. She'd had far, far too much. She was tired of death.

Well, except for one upcoming death in particular…

Widdershins sat on the wet rooftop, legs dangling off the side, and carefully cleaned the diluted blood from her rapier with a bit of torn cloth. Beneath her, in an alley ankle-deep in old rainwater and the “juice” of various garbage heaps, groaned and whimpered a trio of disreputable men who would all live—assuming none of their injuries grew too badly infected—but would probably never walk normally again.

She hadn't
meant
for it to go this way. Once night had again fallen and she'd succeeded in locating a roving gang she recognized as Finders, the plan had been for Widdershins to tail them, observe all she could about the new behaviors of the Guild, hopefully eavesdrop enough to learn some of what was going on in the halls of underground power.

Said plan had survived exactly as long as it took the robbers to find their first victims. When it became clear that the young couple's money was not all the gang was after, that they wouldn't be content without bloodshed or even worse, Shins hadn't been able to stand by.

The result, thanks to the element of surprise and Olgun's power, had been three mangled Finders and three healthy people—the couple and the fourth man of what had been a quartet of brigands—fleeing into the night.

“Wasn't an accident,” Shins explained to her curious partner, shifting along the ledge in a futile effort to find a spot where she could still observe the wounded below yet wasn't soaking her backside in a puddle. “I wanted him to get away.

“Oh, I did
so!
Why would I make up—what?! Right, like I'm going to lie to make you think better of me. You already
know
I mess up a lot, so why…wait, that's not what I…oh, horsebubbles.”

After a few moments, when the tiny deity finally stopped laughing, Shins continued. “
As
I was saying,” she growled, “I don't think he got a good look at me. He just knows
someone
turned his friends into a hedgehog's bedsheets. Since these guys aren't really in
any good shape to talk to me, and they probably don't know much anyway, I figure, let their friend come back with someone more important and less, um, bleedy.

“And don't even
think
of trying to tell me that's not a real word, either. You don't talk. You don't
get
a say in how words work.”

This continued for some time, punctuated by the moans from below. Shins was just in the process of actually defining the word “word” for Olgun's edification when he abruptly alerted her to someone's approach.

“All right. If you'd be so kind?”

The night grew brighter, the sounds sharper. She could hear them clearly, now, the slap of boots, the dull thump of sheathed blades against hips and thighs. “Heh. Guess they're coming prepared. I wonder how many people he
said
it took to flatten his team?”

Olgun snickered.

The gang finally reached the alleyway, led by the man who'd escaped earlier. Shins got ten at a quick head count, more than she really wanted to take on even with Olgun's help. More to the point, though, she also
recognized
one of those heads: bald as a snake's bottom, sitting atop a leather-clad body built more like a bear or a gorilla than a man.