The sporadic gunfire outside stops and so does the innkeeper, he turns and looks Lillian in the eye, “I don’t know if what they’re saying is true, my lady. You may be possessed or in the power of darkness, I do not know, certainly I don’t know how to account for what seems to be happening to you…” More shots from outside drown out the next couple of words, “ … but go while you still can, there’s no reason to go back to your room. I don’t know if you can trust the Inquisitors to help you, once they think they’ve got the smell of something rotten, they’re as likely to kill you as cure.”
“I am not looking for their help and I must go back to my room. If there’s only one of them he shouldn’t be too much trouble.”
“All the same just pitching up like that the night before you come back and knowing to wait; doesn’t that seem like a trap?”
“Why should you care if I’ve been possessed? Wouldn’t you want me stopped like any good citizen?”
“My lady, I am a man of the Carter barony first and from what I’ve seen you could as easily be a girl running from an unwanted match as a servant of the unholy.”
“You’re unusually perceptive.” Lillian concedes.
“No more than many barkeepers, my lady.”
“Well, thank you for your advice and I am sorry for your rough treatment at my hands. There is something I must retrieve from my room. You say you didn’t see any of the other Inquisitors bringing anything out?”
“Quite sure. I had a couple of the kitchen boys watch them in case they tried to steal any of my furnishings. I have little love for the Inquisition, my brother died in their wars and I could never appreciate the madness that drove him or any of the rest of them. Marcus was a man as good and as bad as any other, no matter what they told him and I know that a religious man’s just as likely to steal good bed linen as a pagan, more likely if they can hide behind the cross and get away with it; so I had the boys watch them, they took nothing big enough that it could not fit in their pockets.”
“Then I must go and regain what I left and we must go quickly I don’t think I have much time.” Lillian winces at the sound of yet more shooting from outside.
“Please, my lady, I’m sure the door is open you don’t need me to go further. Let me go back.”
“Very well, then.” Lillian relents stepping to one side to allow the man back down the stairs. Her mind is already occupied with who might be waiting in the room at the top of the stairs, so she is completely unprepared for the innkeeper to make a lunge for her as he passes her on the stair. She has barely any time to curse her naiveté before his weight is pressing her against the wall of the stairwell.
“Aristocrat bitch!” The man snarls, launching a heavy blow into her stomach, causing her to double over. “So quick to think everyone’s your bondsman, that we all owe you allegiance; if it’s not those religious fanatics it’s your kind who thinks we should scrape their boots. Well, they’ll reward me well enough for you and,” a hand fumbles around at her waist and the Innkeeper draws back with the gun in his hand. “until they do I’m going to spend my time making you sorry that you kicked me down.”
Chapter 10:
“Blinded by the Light”
The look of triumph on the innkeeper’s face contorts suddenly in a grimace of pain, as Lillian uncoils and thrusts Blake’s thick bladed knife up and into the heavy set man’s chest.
His finger reflexively tightens on the trigger and a bullet tears a hole into the wall just above Lillian’s head. Blinking from the powdered plaster and gun smoke, her head
ringing from the sound of the shot in a narrow space, Lillian still has the presence of mind to grab the warm pistol from the dying man’s hand before he keels over and tumbles down the stairs. Lillian replaces the weapon in its holster with a practiced motion and pricks up her ears for any response, slow seconds pass and there seem to be no attempts to investigate the commotion on the stairs either from above or below and Lillian breathes a sigh of relief. She forces herself forward when the sporadic gunfire from out side renews itself, reminding her that there is little time to waste if she is to retrieve the book.
She proceeds with caution, though now she cannot help but wonder whether the man the innkeeper told her was waiting, had been nothing more than a means of gaining her trust. A scream of pain from outside spurs her up the last two stairs in a single stride, her hand hovering over her recently fired gun. When she reaches the landing, she scans the corridor for signs of life but all the doors are closed, apart from the third on her left which gapes like the dark space in a gap toothed smile. She does not need to look at the brass numbers on the doors next to it to know that the room was once hers and a sense of foreboding creeps over her, it seems that there might really be someone there after all, waiting in the darkened room. Were they really waiting in the unlit room with the shades drawn, which would be ominous enough, or were they using the open door to draw her attention while they waited behind one of the apparently closed doors hoping to catch her off guard? There is only the slightest scrape of leather as Lillian draws her gun and softly creeps across the quiet hallway. Her eyes flit back and forth looking for the tell tale tremor of a door held ajar or lengthening shadows caused by movement behind her but there is nothing; just the metallic tang of gun smoke in her nostrils, the early morning light pouring through the window set high at the opposite end of the landing and the sound of her heart pounding in her straining ears.
At last the doorway stands in front of her and the roar and pop of the gunfight below has either ended or been smothered by the carpets beneath her feet. Shadow grips the room, narrowing her pupils to tiny points as she searches the darkness. Suddenly the room is bathed in light! There is no striking of a match or smell of oil, instead light seems to simply flood from a globe held by a figure sitting on the bed across from her. Lillian fires off three shots wildly but the blazing light has done its work, everything in the room is a purple tinged blur.
“No need for that, Lillian,” the man on the bed says jovially.
Lillian stiffens at the sound of the voice, “Nathaniel!” She hisses.
“Very quick, my lady, most people would have been too disorientated to recognize an acquaintance so readily. Should I be flattered?”
“No.” Lillian replies, using her free hand to find the wall behind her.
“If that is how you wish it to be,” the Chief Pardoner says calmly, “what you feel is of little consequence to me or to the General for that matter, just so long as you do as you are told.”
“I’m not going back there with you.” Lillian promises, firing another bullet in the direction of the Inquisitor.
“A bit closer that time, that means your eyes are getting better, that’s good, not everyone recovers when we are forced to use the flash globe. One of my master’s cunning toys but not without its risks. No!” Nathaniel snaps, registering the anger on Lillian’s face, “do not think for a moment that I take any risk to your august personage lightly but if you will insist on being
ornary
, then what choice do you leave me? I have no wish to be shot and no doubt you would shoot me quite heartily.”
“I’d fucking love to!” Lillian spits back, trying to pinpoint the exact position of the mocking voice.
“Language! Language! My dear, you wouldn’t want to come over as poorly bred would you?
I suppose you should know that at this very moment I am recording every word we say. There is no doubting the master’s genius in making the device; such a simple thing really but you would not believe how useful it is to replay the results of an interrogation where one has become… over excited. It really does make sure that nothing gets missed.”
“I don’t want to marry Leedon or be part of your mad quest and not you or a hundred of your thugs will make me change my mind.”
“You have no wish to be part of what quest, exactly?” The Pardoner asks, chuckling “and here we thought you such an innocent. It seems strange to me, however, that you should return here of all places, if all you were trying to do was run away from an unwanted marriage. Did you forget something, perhaps?”
Lillian responds with stony silence, desperately blinking her eyes in an attempt to clear her vision. For just a moment she is rewarded by a blurry but stable image of the man sitting on the bed, she squeezes off another round but the Pardoner hardly flinches as the bullet tears the fabric of his loose fitting habit.
He continues to speak almost immediately, unfazed by the shot or her anger.
“Of course, whether you will even be offered the chance to marry the General now has yet to be decided; after all your current attitude hardly speaks well for the future of such an alliance….” Nathaniel breaks off.
“My lady, unless my ears deceived me you already fired a shot on the hallway, so your pistol should now be empty, there is no need to constantly brandish it wildly. Frankly I think it stops you from listening to me.”
Lillian realizes the truth of this and reluctantly returns her weapon to its holster.
“Well, what have you got to say that’s worth listening to? Or am I going to have to listen to your smug self-congratulation until I wish I were deaf as well as blind?”
“I could arrange both!” The Inquisitor snaps, before calming himself to continue where he had left off. “As I was saying, your attitude may force us to change our plans but as has already been amply demonstrated, you are too valuable to be left to wander around free.”
“Valuable? I’m not an old piece of jewelry or a thoroughbred horse you know.”
“And yet you seem to have much in common with both. You have already been stolen once and I’m sure whoever you have downstairs helping you was not persuaded by your smile, pretty as it is. You know as well as I that you are a commodity in your own right, a baron’s daughter and the only daughter of Baron Carter. But, really, Lillian do we need to fence with each other any more? When the match was first suggested it was believed that you were ignorant of the part we expected you to play; my master placed you with your foster father to ensure this, so that not even your own thoughts could betray you.”
“My foster father? Are you saying that I am not a Carter?”
“No, just not
Jesop’s
daughter, but you must know all this? Yorick must have explained when he found you.”
“Yorick? I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Come. Come. Enough of this,” the Chief Pardoner purrs, “it will go better if you simply admit it.”
“I swear I don’t know what you are talking about.” Lillian protests.
“That would be so easy to believe if you hadn’t stolen the book and brought it here for Yorick. Did you think we would not have a way to recover such a valuable artifact?”
“I took the book, it’s true but only because … I wasn’t… I still won’t let you use me.” No point in denying the obvious, Lillian thinks to herself if they’ve found it here than there’s nothing to be gained but Nathaniel clearly thinks that I know more than I do. All this talk of a ‘master’ and Yorick might prove to be interesting ammunition if they did drag her back to Leedon. She was willing to bet the General would be interested to hear that his Chief Pardoner served another master.
“So you just walked into a hidden and heavily secured room, bypassed all the locks and took the book, the one at the centre of our whole search, by accident?”
“No, not by accident, I overheard the two of you talking about it. The General kept going to the tower rather than paying any attention to me and it wasn’t hard to follow him. As for the locks they were open when I got there. I took it because..” a thought bubbles unlooked for into Lillian’s mind. Why had she gone there? Now that she thought about it, why was the book so important? The answer seems to elude her, like a quick fish darting back into he depths of a dark pool, leaving her to stammer lamely, “
becau
.. because, I thought it was what he deserved for trying to use me.”
“You expect me to believe that?” Nathaniel asks incredulously. “That you are just a vindictive girl, who heard too much and then just stumbled upon something so important,
over-riding all the precautions we have taken?”
“I never said I stumbled and I knew my name was in it because I heard you say so. As for vindictive, it was what he deserved.” Lillian insists, thrusting all thought that there might have been any other reason but revenge from her mind, as if even thinking about it in the Inquisitor’s company could be dangerous.
“So you just brought the book here and left it for Yorick to take.”
So they don’t have the book, Lillian reasons breathing a small sigh of relief, not even allowing herself to wonder why it really matters to her, to even go down that line of thought seems somehow wrong. Yorick, whoever he was, had obviously beaten them to the book; something else was puzzling her though.
“Of course I didn’t leave the book for Yorick, whoever he may be. Why did you even bother to wait for me if you knew the book was gone and you really believed that I had left the book here to be picked up by someone else? Why would you expect me to come back?”
“Perhaps you would like me to read you the note Yorick left for you under the floor boards in the corner. We know the book was there because we found it next to this.” Nathaniel holds up a small gem, which Lillian would have recognized as having as strong resemblance to General
Leedon’s
betrothal necklace, had her eyes not still been recovering from their trauma. As it is, she can just about make out the flickering red glow and the square shape of an unfolded and yellowed piece of paper in the Pardoner’s other hand. The fact that she can notice that much detail makes her think of reloading her gun but she knows that there is no way to do that without Nathaniel noticing and so rejects the idea almost as soon as she has it.