Ilbei and Kaige menaced him warily. The thrum of Meggins’ bowstring drew a glance from Ilbei, revealing that Meggins was shooting at torchlights outside of the cave. The archer danced back and forth, in and out of the line of sight. Every shot he took brought arrows clattering off the stone all around him, which in turn brought rounds of profanity from Meggins. Mags looked as if she wanted to help somehow.
“Stay back, Mags,” Ilbei said. “And make sure Jasper don’t wander into view neither. And Jasper, by the hells, if ya got somethin besides yawnin silence in that there paper, get it done.”
Jasper’s voice changed at the moment of Ilbei’s command, and as Ilbei and Kaige ducked and dodged and feinted and parried the crashing mash of the big man’s double-oak blows, Ilbei hoped that Jasper’s magic would bring some form of remedy and not just make things worse.
But nothing happened. Despite several long moments of fighting defensively, waiting for an effect, the only thing that changed were the words Jasper spoke. His tone perhaps became a little more pronounced, though Ilbei couldn’t spare the attention required to be sure. But no magic ensued. No fireballs or ice lances or lightning spears to burst the giant man apart. Jasper simply seemed to give different voice to the same sort of murmuring from before.
After three more dives to avoid decapitation, and a duck to avoid the same, a successful cut on Kaige’s part had the towering assailant bleeding down one leg. Ilbei tried to get in close enough to finish him, but their towering assailant had too great a reach to get easily inside. Ilbei glanced back at Jasper, but the wizard still hadn’t done a thing. Ilbei added his profanities to the stream Meggins had underway, and once again Ilbei gave up on magic and set to the work of finishing the big man off himself—although he had no strategy yet for how to get close without being crushed.
And getting close was not a simple thing, for despite the dullard look of him, their adversary’s reach was astonishing. With all that size, his arms were more than half of him in length, fifteen hands, long as a horse was tall. And that just the start. Add in the length of those two great clubs, and the monstrous fellow could hold both his opponents easily at bay. Other than missing a second head, he might as well have been the ettin that long ago occupied this old cave.
An arrow
tinked
off of Kaige’s armor and deflected toward the back of the cave, where it embedded itself in the flank of one of the horses tethered there. The horse added its frightened whinnies to the racket of the fight, the clang of steel, the thud of wood, bowstrings twanging and men cursing for all their worth. The not-quite ettin roared loudest of them all.
“Watch yer angle,” Ilbei called to Kaige, who had just turned aside a blow that would have pulped him. Ilbei moved himself closer to the wall. He circled and tried to get in behind his enemy, but despite the vacant look in the man’s eyes, he wasn’t so vacant as that. Whoever had trained him to fight had trained him well.
A cry and a grunt from Meggins showed that the infernal Gad Pander had worked himself loose from Ilbei’s too-hastily tied knots and had thrown himself on the archer. The two of them lay grappling.
In his distraction, Ilbei wasn’t fast enough, and a sweep of a great oak club came at him like a hardwood hurricane. He got his pickaxe up in time to attenuate the blow on the haft some, but the force still threw him the two spans between himself and the cave wall, where he struck with a breath-blasting thud.
Two men ran in from the outside, and Mags, hidden from their view, swung a flat blow with her quarterstaff across the cave mouth, so hard and so level that Ilbei was certain she’d crushed one of the newcomer’s windpipes even as Ilbei himself gasped for air. The other was barely nicked by her swing, but it caught his attention. He changed the course of his charge from Meggins to Mags, and if there was any relief to be had in that, it was that he held as a weapon a sledgehammer of the most common workman’s variety. Ilbei hoped that whatever training Mags had gotten from the Sisters of Mercy was up to the man’s combat abilities with that.
The hammer shot out, a low, punching-type strike. Mags leapt to her left, letting the hammer crash into the cave wall as she brought her staff down hard alongside his neck. Ilbei heard the crack of his collarbone at the same time he let out a yelp. Mags would be okay.
Kaige, like Ilbei had just done, blocked a blow that came so hard it threw him back against the wall. He wasn’t winded by the impact, though, and he, again like Ilbei, rushed back in to prevent the titanic human from getting any closer to their companions. That’s when Ilbei was reminded of the fire burning there, just visible out of the corner of his eye. Maybe he could get the brute to stumble into it somehow. He needed something, some kind of advantage. They were running out of time.
“
Sorvanor maricopse veyn
!” Jasper shouted.
Ilbei had time to turn to look, his mind only beginning to shape a question about what that meant, when there came a thumping sensation down upon him, a soft thump like the quasi-solidification of air, a rush of it, all in an instant as if by a blow but not, a wave of pressure perhaps, soft and yet brutal, not so unlike the sort of blow that might come from a great club made of oak, if oak could be made of air. Then Ilbei saw the ground rushing up at him. At least, for a moment. And then he, like the rest, like Kaige, Mags, Meggins and the man he was grappling with, even the giant man and, sadly, Jasper, went off into the dark place called unconsciousness, leaving behind a whole cave full of motionless bodies. Even the forge fire went out.
Chapter 20
W
hen Ilbei came to, he was lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling of the cave. Morning was just creeping inside, an angle of it slicing into the gloom like a blade of light. There were voices nearby, and he sat bolt upright, reaching for his pickaxe. It was not on his back, and for a dazed, post-concussion moment, he patted himself down seeking the weapon with his hands as his eyes looked around for the enemy.
He found them, several of them, five men trussed up like pot roasts, lying right where he’d left them, two more near the cave entrance, plus the great brute with the oak-limb clubs lying off to the left, nearly mummified in rope. He did not fight against the bonds, and Ilbei realized he was unconscious, just as Ilbei himself had been for apparently quite some time.
Ilbei looked for his companions and found them lying roughly in a row beside him to the right: Kaige immediately beside him, then Meggins, then Mags, then Jasper. He could see two lines in the dirt near Jasper’s heels, drawn by the act of someone dragging him, and marking the path that someone had taken when they’d brought him from the cave entrance to where he was now. Ilbei noted that each of his companions breathed comfortably, a great relief, and all of them were asleep.
He stood and assessed himself, found that he was in fine health but for a headache, which was not much worse than those that follow a fine sort of evening, and discovered in a glance at the wall that his pickaxe was leaning there behind him. He took it up and looked about again, seeking the source of the voices that he heard.
Some came from the passage out of which the big brute and several others had emerged. Others came from outside.
Worried about those behind him in the cave, Ilbei entered the passage and crept down it, staying out of the little waterway running through it and following the curve until he’d gone beyond the last assistance of the dawn’s light. He pressed forward into the darkness, squinting and hoping for some form of light to emerge. Then the dim flicker of firelight appeared from around the bend. He picked his way along until he came to where the passage branched left and right.
The light came from the right, so he peered around the bend and saw, to his surprise, Major Cavendis standing over Gad Pander. The counterfeiter’s hands were bound behind him, his ankles tied together, and he sat upon a low rock with blood running from his mouth and nose.
Major Cavendis, still in his lordly attire, was shaking his head as he gazed down at the battered man, and Ilbei saw that he held an extinguished torch, the wrappings at its end dangling loose like a tangle of untied boot strings.
“Listen here, Pander,” Cavendis was saying. “I really don’t enjoy this sort of thing, but I’ll stand here all day and all tomorrow if I have to until you tell me where they are.”
Pander spat blood out into the dirt at the major’s feet. “I already told you where they were. I’ve told you fifty times. Fifty-one will be the same.”
The major smashed the torch down on Pander’s knee. The captive cried out, and Ilbei recognized it as the same sound that had woken him from unconsciousness. The bloody miner fell off the rock, his body rigid with the wave of anguish until the worst of it had passed. The major pulled him back up by one arm and resat him on the rock.
“Let’s try the other one then,” the major said, as casually as if they were discussing the results of a recent royal tournament. “What else have you seen?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Please, just tell me what you want me to have seen, and I’ll say I saw it yesterday. Gods, I don’t know what you want from me.”
“You’re a stubborn man, Pander. And braver than I’d have given you credit for.” The major struck him twice across the face with the torch, once forehand and another back. One of Pander’s teeth flew across the cave and bounced off the rocks. “The problem is,” resumed the young lord, “that bravery here nets you nothing. So, let’s start once again. Where are the molds?”
“In the packs,” Pander gasped, his head drooping, chin to chest, blood running in a stream. He began to sob, barely more than a whimper, repeating over and over, “They’re in the Mercy-loving packs like I’ve told you a hundred times.”
Ilbei could tell the answer infuriated the major by the way he straightened, his face rising so that he might gaze up toward the ceiling, an exasperated prayer to the gods of patience, perhaps. “I’ve checked the wretched packs, Pander. You were sitting right there when I did it. So where are they in all of that, hmmm?” He pointed with the ragged end of the torch toward the wall just inside the opening, the wall behind which Ilbei hid, so Ilbei could not see what he was pointing at. Cavendis struck the man once more, a powerful blow to the ear, so hard it knocked him off the rock again. He left him there and spun to exit the room. At which point he saw Ilbei gawking at him.
“Spadebreaker!” he said. “Good. I see you are revived. I trust you had a nice nap?” He grinned as pleasantly as if he and Ilbei were great old friends.
“Aye, sar. I suppose I did.” Ilbei’s gray brows wriggled unevenly on his forehead.
“Well, your timing is excellent. As you can see, we’ve found the animal that Pander here claims you took from him, and having gone through the packs, we can’t seem to find a particular item that we came looking for.”
Ilbei stepped into the chamber and looked where the major was once again pointing, toward that nearest wall. Sure enough, there were the two panniers Ilbei had gone through and then carefully repacked.
“What might ya be lookin fer, sar?”
Cavendis studied him for a long string of heartbeats, the same sort of look Ilbei had seen him employ when they’d sat together and played cards so briefly not so many nights ago. Ilbei’s face remained exactly as it was. There was cheating at cards, and then there was the real game, where the façade mattered as much as the cards.
“We’re looking for the other half of those.” He directed Ilbei’s gaze to a long table in an alcove opposite where Ilbei stood. He took another torch from a sconce mounted on the wall and led Ilbei to the table, where there were ten flat ceramic bricks. Each of them had perfectly circular impressions pressed into them, all depicting in relief a gryphon and its rider flying above the great Palace in Crown City. There were words written around the top and bottom edges along the rim, presumably backwards and in the language Ilbei couldn’t read.
“Them’s counterfeiters’ molds,” Ilbei said.
“Precisely, Sergeant. And as you can see, they are but half of what is needed to forge a proper gold crown of Kurr.”
“So they are. And a two-tailed crown wouldn’t buy a man a grope, even in the brothels of Murdoc Bay.”
“No, Sergeant, it wouldn’t. Which is why I know that somewhere there exists the other half of this set. Our friend Pander here insists that you took possession of that other half when you relieved him of his horse.”
It was once again Ilbei’s turn to evaluate the major’s hand. He had a bad feeling that the major, despite his youth, was the better liar between them, a man likely trained to it since birth. But Ilbei knew there was something missing still, despite having no evidence of it. He wondered if maybe it was simply because he didn’t like the man, because he knew that Cavendis was a cheat. Cheats and liars were hardly better than animals in the end. But he was a major, even if he didn’t bother to wear Her Majesty’s colors most times—yet another thing about him that crawled under Ilbei’s skin. But he had to answer something for it.
He glanced at the major, then at the molds, then across the room where Gad Pander lay. He nodded his head. “Yes, sar,” he said. “He’s told ya true about that—and seems a number of times he told ya too, what with ya havin beat him half to death so as to hear it over and over again.”
“Well, where are they?” Relief was evident in the way the major’s shoulders moved, lowering as tension left—relief where Ilbei had expected reproach or some abuse for what he’d just said and how he’d said it. “Then why didn’t you say something before?”