Oathblood (11 page)

Maybe.

The Lady had arrived attended by no one—which caused Kethry's eyebrow to rise. And she wasn't much better dressed than a well-to-do merchant's wife, which surprised Tarma.

It was too bad they'd had to meet under circumstances like this one; Tarma would have liked to get to know her. She held herself quietly, but with an air of calm authority like a Shin‘a'in shaman. A square face and graying blonde hair held remnants of great beauty—not ruined beauty either, just transformed into something with more character than simple prettiness.

She gazed dispassionately down on the body of her former Lord for several long moments. And Tarma longed to know what was going on in her head.

“I'm afraid I have to agree with your assessment on all counts, Shin‘a'in,” she replied. “I shan't miss him, poor man. Neither will anyone else, to be frank. But this puts us all in a rather delicate position. I appreciate that you could have fled. I appreciate that you didn‘t—”

“No chance,” Kethry answered, without elaborating. She'd signaled to her partner that her damned ensorcelled blade had flared up at her the heartbeat after Lord Gorley breathed his last. Plainly his Lady would be in danger from his death. Just as plainly, Need expected them to do something about this.

“Well.” Lady Gorley turned away from the body as a thing of no importance, and faced Tarma. “Let me explain a little something. In the past several years Kendrik has been more and more addicted to the bottle, and less and less capable. The Viden-folk took to bringing
me
their business, and when Kendrik hired that gang of his and began extracting money from them,
I
began returning it as soon as it went into the treasury. No one was hurt, and no one was the wiser.”

“What about—” Tarma coughed politely. “Begging your pardon milady, but that kind of scum generally is bothersome to young women—”

She smiled thinly. “The men satisfied their lust without rapine—Kendrik knew I wouldn't stand for that, and
I
was the one who saw to his comforts. One week of doing without proper food and without his wine taught him to respect my wishes in that, at least. And the one time Kendrik took it into his head to abscond with a Viden-girl—well, let us just say that his capabilities were not equal to his memories. I smuggled the girl out of his bed and back to her parents as virgin as she'd left.”

“So that's why—”

“Why none of us cared to see things disturbed,” the innkeeper put in, nodding so hard Tarma thought his head was going to come off. “Things was all right—we'd warn travelers, and if they chose to disregard the warnings—” he shrugged. “—sheep was meant to be sheared, they say, and fools meant to share the same fate.”

“So what's the problem?” Tarma asked, then realized in the next breath what the problem was. “Ah—the bullyboys. Without Kendrik to pay ‘em and to keep his hand on 'em—”

Lady Gorley nodded. “Exactly. They
won't
heed me. I would be in as much danger from them as my people. We're farm and tradesfolk here;
we
would be easy prey for them. It will be bad if I keep them, and worse if I discharge them.”

Tarma pursed her lips thoughtfully. “Your respect, Lady, but I've got no wish to take on a couple dozen bad cases with just me and my partner and less than a day to take them out. But maybe if we put our heads together—”

 

“You've got until moonrise,” Lady Gorley said, handing a pouch up to Tarma that chinked as she looked inside before stowing it away in her saddlebag. Light streaming from the back door of the inn gave Tarma enough illumination to see that more than half the coins were gold. “That is really all the time we can give you. And I'm sorry I didn't have much to pay you for your discomfort.”

“It'll be enough,” Tarma assured her. “Now—you've got it all straight—at moonrise you raise the hue and cry after us; you offer fifty gold to the man who brings back our heads, and you turn the lads loose. They're going to hear the word ‘gold' and they won't even stop to think—they'll just head out after us. You do realize this is going to cost you in horses—they'll take every good mount in your stables.”

Lady Gorley shrugged. “That can't be helped, and better horses than lives. But can you lay a trail that will keep them following without getting caught yourselves?”

Tarma laughed. “You ask a
Shin‘a'in
if she can lay a trail? No fear. By the time they get tired of following—those that I don't lose once their horses founder—they'll have had second and third thoughts about coming back to Viden. They'll know that
you'll
never keep them on. They'll think about the kings' men you've likely called in—and the good armsmen of your neighbors. And they'll be so far from here that they'll give it all up as a bad cause.”

The innkeeper nodded. “She's right, Lady. They drifted in; they drift out just the same with no easy pickings in sight.”

“What about that little rhymester?” Tarma asked, nodding back at the tavern door. They hadn't noticed the minstrel trying to make himself a part of the wall until it was too late to do anything about him.

“I'll keep him locked up until it's safe to let him go,” the innkeeper replied. “If I know musickers, he'll have a long gullet for wine. I'll just keep him too happy to move.”

“Very well—and the gods go with you,” Lady Gorley said, stepping away from the horses.

“Well, Greeneyes,” Tarma smiled crookedly at her partner.

Kethry sighed, and smiled back. “All right, I'll geas them. But dammit, that means
we
won't be seeing beds for months!”

Tarma nudged Ironheart with her heels and the battlemare sighed as heavily as Kethry had, but moved out down the village street with a faint jingling of harness. “Greeneyes, I didn't say you should geas them to follow us now, did I?”

“Then who—”

“Remember that loudmouth, Rory Halfaxe? The one that kept trying to drag you into his bed? He's in Lyavor, and planning on going the direction opposite of this place. Now if we double back and come up on his backtrail—think you can transfer the geas?”

 

Leslac slumped, nearly prostrate with despair. His head pounded, and he downed another mug of wine without tasting it.
Oh, gods of fortune—do you hate me?

He couldn't believe what he had seen—he just
couldn‘t
!

First—that—
farce
with the broomstick. He moaned and covered his eyes with his hand. How could
anyone
make a heroic ballad out of
that?
“Her broomstick flashing in her hands—”? Oh, gods, they'd laugh him out of town; they wouldn't
need
the rotten vegetables.

Then—that Lord Gorley died by
accident
! Gods, gods, gods—

“This can't be happening to me,” he moaned into his mug. “This simply cannot be happening.”

And as if that wasn't enough—the collusion between Gorley's widow and the other two to lure the gang of bullies away without so much as a single
fight!

“I'm ruined,” he told the wine. “I am utterly
ru
ined. How could they do this to me? This is
not
the way heroes are supposed to behave—what am I going to
do?
Why couldn't things have happened the way they
should
have happened?”

Then—the
way they
should
have happened—

The dawn light creeping in the window of his little cubby on the second floor of the inn was no less brilliant than the inspiration that came to him.

The way they
should
have happened
!

Feverishly he reached for pen and paper, and began to write—

“The warrior and the sorceress rode into Viden-town, for they had heard of evil there and meant to bring
it
down
—”

I love locked-room mysteries, and I thought it would be fun to do one with a different setting—one in which magic was used in place of forensic detection, but magic itself was
not
used to create the mystery in the first place. And who better to take that setting than Tarma and Kethry?

 

 

She stood all alone on the high scaffold made of raw, yellow wood, as motionless as any statue. She was cold despite the heat of the summer sunlight that had scorched her without pity all this day; cold with the ice-rime of fear. She had begun her vigil as the sun rose at her back; now the last light of it flushed her white gown and her equally white face, lending her pale cheeks false color. The air was heavy, hot and scented only with the odor of scorched grass and sweating bodies, but she breathed deeply, desperately of it. Soon now, soon—

Soon the last light of the sun would die, and she would die with it. Already she could hear the men beneath her grunting as they heaved piles of oily brush and faggots of wood into place below her platform. Already the motley-clad herald was signaling to the bored and weary trumpeter in her husband's green livery that he should sound the final call.
Her
last chance for aid.

For the last time the three rising notes of a summoning rang forth over the crowd beneath her. For the last time the herald cried out his speech to a sea of pitying or avid faces.
They
knew that this was the last time, the last farcical call, and they waited for the climax of this day's fruitless vigil.

“Know ye all that the Lady Myria has been accused of the foul and unjust murder of her husband, Lord Corbie of Felwether. Know that she has called for trial by combat as is her right. Know that she names no champion, trusting in the gods to send forth one to fight in her name as token of her innocence. Therefore, if such there be, I do call, command, and summon him here, to defend her honor!”

No one looked to the gate except Myria. She, perforce, must look there, since she was bound to her platform with hempen rope as thick as her thumb. This morning she had strained her eyes toward that empty arch every time the trumpet sounded, but no savior had come—and now even she had lost hope.

 

The swordswoman called Tarma goaded her gray Shin‘a'in warsteed into another burst of speed, urging her on with hand and voice (though not spur—never spur) as if she were pursued by the Jackals of Darkness. Her long, ebony braids streamed behind her; close enough to catch one of them rode her amber-haired partner, the sorceress Kethry; Kethry's mare a scant half a length behind her herd-sister.

Kethry's geas-blade, Need by name, had awakened her this morning almost before the sun rose, and had been driving the sorceress (and so her blood-oath sister as well) in this direction all day. At first it had been a simple pull, as she had often felt before. Both Kethry and Tarma knew from experience that once Need called, Kethry had very little choice in whether or not she would answer that call, so they had packed up their camp and headed for the source. But the call had grown more urgent as the hours passed, not less so—increasing to the point where by mid-afternoon it was actually causing Kethry severe mental pain. They had gotten Tarma's companion-beast Warrl up onto his carry-pad and urged their horses first into a fast walk, then a trot, then as sunset neared, into a full gallop. Kethry was near-blind by the mental anguish it caused. Need would not be denied in this; Kethry was soul-bonded to it—it conferred upon her a preternatural fighting skill, it had healed both of them of wounds it was unlkikely they would have survived otherwise—but there was a price to pay for the gifts it conferred. Kethry (and thus Tarma) was bound to aid any woman in distress within the blade's sensing range—and it seemed there was one such woman in grave peril now. Peril of her life, by the way the blade was driving Kethry.

Ahead of them on the road they were following loomed a walled village; part and parcel of a manor-keep—a common arrangement in these parts. The gates were open; the fields around empty of workers. That was odd—very odd. It was high summer, and there should have been folk out in the fields, weeding and tending the irrigation ditches. There was no immediate sign of trouble—but as they neared the gates, it was plain just who the woman they sought was—

Bound to a scaffold high enough to be visible through the open gates, they could see a young, dark-haired woman dressed in white, almost like a sacrificial victim. The last rays of the setting sun touched her with color—touched also the heaped wood beneath the platform on which she stood, making it seem as if her pyre already blazed up. Lining the mud-plastered walls of the keep and crowding the square inside the gate were scores of folk of every class and station, all silent, all waiting.

Tarma really didn't give a fat damn about what they were waiting for, though it was a good bet that they were there for the show of the burning, and not out of sympathy for the woman. She coaxed a final burst of speed out of her tired mount, sending her shooting ahead of Kethry's as they passed the gates, and bringing her close in to the platform. Once there, she swung her mare Hellsbane around in a tight circle and drew her sword, placing herself between the woman on the scaffold and the men with the torches to set it alight.

She knew she was an imposing sight, even covered with sweat and the dust of the road; hawk-faced, intimidating, ice-blue eyes blazing defiance. Her clothing was patently that of a fighting mercenary; plain brown leathers and brigandine armor. Her sword reflected the dying sunlight so that she might have been holding a living flame in her hand. She said nothing; her pose said it all for her—

Nevertheless, one of the men started forward, torch in hand.

“I wouldn‘t—” Kethry said from behind him. She was framed in the arch of the gate, silhouetted against the fiery sky; her mount rock-still, her hands glowing with sorcerous energy. “If Tarma doesn't get you,
I
will.”