What Remains of Heroes (34 page)

The man spun the great axe about his hip with tremendous force, so much so there was no hope he could adjust its path. Lannick dropped face down as the weapon whistled toward him. He then lunged forward on hands and knees once it had moved over him. He drove the tip of his sword right into the man’s bits.

The big oaf dropped the axe and stumbled backward, clutching his bleeding crotch and letting loose a pained squeal. He knocked into Silas before tumbling off the pier and into the waters of the Sullen Sea, causing Silas to stagger backward and fall. The oaf splashed wildly about in the sea, and it was obvious he couldn’t swim and would very likely drown.

Lannick turned to the smaller ruffian who stood grinning with a wild look in his bloodshot eyes, his hands caressing his dagger like a lover. He seemed to be the sort who enjoyed killing, and Lannick knew that was never a good sort to encounter.

“You don’t want to join your friend, do you?” Lannick asked as amiably as he could manage.

The ruffian shrugged and smiled crazily, his dagger at the ready.

Lannick held forth a hand, pleading. “Silas! We can settle this without more bloodshed! This is a dispute over only money, nothing more. Certainly we can resolve this?”

Silas pressed himself to his feet and dusted off his breeches, his face still disquietingly calm. “
Only
money, Lannick? You should know I don’t regard it as
only
money. Money is not an end in itself, but rather the one means to obtain
all
other things, whether they be things of comfort, power, or even love. When you take money from me, you are stealing from me all those other things as well.”

“I’ve stolen nothing.”

“Borrowing money with no intention of repaying is the very same as stealing.” Silas slipped his hand into his coat and produced a cleaver, its wide blade glinting in the morning sunlight. He moved to stand beside the dirty ruffian, leaving no way around them on the narrow pier. “And when you, a man I trusted, a man I helped, took money from me, you betrayed me in the worst possible way.”

Lannick scowled. He’d wanted a break from his past, from those nine awful years. He wished there was another way but knew there wasn’t.
Sometimes the past can only be washed away by blood
.

Lannick knew better than to wait this time. He danced toward the ruffian, keeping his strides uneven and unpredictable and flipping his sword in his hand so to hold it upside down. The ruffian sank low, the long dagger swaying in his hands and ready to strike.

The ruffian’s dark eyes fixated Lannick’s midsection and he panted like a dog. Lannick had seen such eyes before and reckoned the man would worry only about inflicting violence rather than becoming the victim of it.

He saw there his chance.

As Lannick closed the distance the ruffian’s eyes widened and he shoved his dagger toward the spaces between Lannick’s ribs. Just as Lannick had hoped, the man had failed to guard himself. Before the fellow’s arm had fully extended Lannick’s sword was already deep inside that soft space between his neck and collarbone. The ruffian’s arm jerked and his dagger dropped from twitching hands.

Lannick withdrew the weapon and stepped back to allow the man to flop headfirst into the sea. He lowered his sword and turned to face Silas, knowing the pawnbroker never committed violence himself—always preferring to watch instead.

“You were always quick,” said Silas in his discomforting monotone, “even for a drunk.”

Lannick shook the slop from his blade with disgust. “Forget this thing, Silas. Leave me be.”

Silas adjusted the patch over his missing eye and his shoulders drooped. “No,” he said glumly, and threw his cleaver toward Lannick’s head.

Lannick dodged the cleaver easily. However, he didn’t see the small knife Silas wielded until it was almost too late. The blade had been intended for his gut, but Lannick managed to shift his body just enough that it dug into his hip instead. His flesh burned as the weapon scraped against bone and twisted about.

Lannick wrenched himself free and seized Silas by the throat. “My blade was never meant for you!” he roared.

Silas’s mouth fell open as he gasped for air. Lannick reared back and shoved his sword through the maw, his hand nearly ripping through the other side.

Silas collapsed, dead, his head a bloody mess.

Lannick blinked hard and his mouth trembled as the body fell to the planks, trembled for an instant, and then grew still. He looked upon the pawnbroker’s corpse for a quiet moment before kicking it from the pier.

He shook the blood and gristle from his skin as though shaking off an awful chill, and suddenly wanted whiskey more than anything. He limped back toward
The Whaler’s Widow
, leaving behind him a trail of blood.

Lannick sat naked upon the edge of his bed in the small, sunlit room, a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a bloody rag in the other. The wound—in the fleshy part between his hip and his rump—hurt horribly and had yet to stop bleeding. He soaked the rag again with the whiskey bottle and pressed it against the wound, and then took a hearty pull himself to deaden the pain.

He swallowed and gritted his teeth, as much from the burn of the whiskey as the memory of the morning’s events. He regretted the needless violence, regretted that his past had such an awful habit of grabbing at his heels and dragging him back. All he wanted was a break, a clean break from the mistakes of the last nine years.
But then perhaps there is no such thing as clean break. Not from my past, anyway
.

He took another long strip of the cloth he’d borrowed from the widow and wrapped it around his pelvis, about the bloody rag and then around twice more. He needed to stitch the wound but his hands were still shaking from the fight. He painfully pulled his clothing on and staggered downstairs to the inn’s common room.

The place wasn’t nearly as raucous as it’d been the night before. A couple of crusty fisherman chatted near the fire and another fellow brooded over a tankard near one of the room’s square windows. The widow was mopping the planked floor, softly singing an old sailor’s dirge.

Lannick walked gingerly to an empty table in a corner and eased himself into a chair with a wince. The widow looked at him, her plump face brightening with a kind smile. Her eyes drifted toward the rafters, as though lost in thought, then suddenly she dropped the mop, raised a finger and shuffled to the bar. She rummaged about, retrieved something then rushed to Lannick.

“Oh my,” she said in a breathless tone, “my old head is as leaky as that damned boat that drowned my husband, Illienne bless him. I nearly forgot. A great big fellow came here last night after you’d retired. Said someone had left a note for you at his place, some unsavory bar I think, and he asked me to give it to you. That, along with another one.”

Lannick thanked her and took the two notes, figuring they’d been delivered by Brugan. The first was folded into quarters and closed with a wax seal bearing a familiar mark: a watchtower.
The mark of the Variden
. He shifted uncomfortably in his seat and then opened the note slowly, almost worried something would jump at him from the parchment.

The note was written in a coded text, a secret language of the Variden. At first it was difficult to decipher, but soon Lannick found the old knowledge returning to him and the meaning of the symbols became clear.

“
Lannick
,” the note began. “
I hope this letter finds you well, and that you’ve found some kind of peace with your demons. I know things have been difficult, but I know also that within you is the courage to overcome
them
.

“
I write to you in desperation and I appeal to your virtue. Our colleague Merek has learned the murder of the Sanctum’s Lector was arranged by the Necrists. What is worse, the murderer now hosts the spirit of Castor. Merek managed to capture this murderer and is transporting him to Ironmoor, where he hopes the Sanctum can remove the spirit and restore it in one of their number, so that Castor’s wisdom and power are preserved. If this cannot be done, then I fear our ability to fight our enemy will be greatly
diminished.

“Merek has also discovered that Arranan’s Spider King is no ordinary warlord. He keeps the company of several Necrist sorcerers and may be a Necrist himself. This Spider King marches against Rune with an army tens of thousands strong, and has decimated its forces at every
turn.

“
I need not tell you what catastrophe these events portend, nor need I describe to you the stakes. Our worst fears are taking form, and Rune could soon plunge into its darkest moment. Our Order’s need has never been greater, and we require every last of our number if Rune is to have any hope of surviving the coming
storm
.

“
Come back to us, Lannick. I beg you
.”

It was signed simply “
Alisa
.”

Lannick slumped back into his chair, stunned. He breathed deeply and his head sagged after reading the note once more.

He set it aside and opened the second note, a roll of stained parchment covered in a sloppy scribble. “
Meet at Gregor’s Watch on Averday, on the full moon. Nine o’clock. I have our army, Captain
.”

Lannick recognized the clumsy script as Brugan’s, and Averday was but two days away. His head sagged even lower.

“Is everything alright?” asked the widow, mopping the floor nearby.

“I’ll need another bottle of that whiskey.”

“For that cut of yours?”

Lannick had almost forgotten about his wound and he rubbed it absent-mindedly. “Uh, yeah.”

Lannick again sat at the edge of his bed, threading the dark string through the needle’s eye. His hands had stopped shaking, but he couldn’t be certain whether that was from the passage of time or the effects of more than a couple of swigs of whiskey.

The wound near his hip still wept blood but was otherwise clean. Satisfied, he squeezed it closed with one hand and pressed the needle through with the other. It stung a bit, but not nearly as much as it would have without the whiskey.
A shame that’s not the only reason I need to drink
.

He pulled the string through then around the wound and then through it again. After a few more punctures with the needle and loops of the string the wound was sealed, held shut by an uneven, black stitch.
Not pretty, but it will do
.

Lannick pressed a cloth to the mouth of the whiskey bottle, wetted it, and then gently wiped away the blood. As he did so he found himself reminded of that awful night, that passage through the shadows and the hideous faces of the Necrist and her Shodafayn abominations. He remembered with terrifying clarity those thick, grisly stitches binding the faces of his family to the skulls of those demons. He remembered how the flesh stretched and wriggled and bunched, straining against the stitching. He guessed they would not have looked like human faces at all, had their features not been so painfully familiar.

He grabbed the whiskey bottle again and took a long drink and then slammed it down upon his bedside table. After wrapping and rewrapping clean cloth strips about his hips he dressed and strapped on his sword and satchel. He grabbed the note from Alisa and stood still for a long moment, looking out his window at the twilit sky and the purple sea beneath it.

He thought of all his troubles, all the hardships he’d endured both by his own hands and by those of others. He thought of his family, of their deaths and their burial. He thought of all those dreadful nights thereafter, of his nights spent sobbing, of his rejection of the Variden, and of his descent into drunken desperation. He thought of his dark deeds for Silas and of Silas’s face impaled upon his sword. He thought of his nightmare in the shadowpaths with the perversions of the faces he loved, and of burying his family once again.

Then he thought of General Fane. He thought of the man leering over him after he’d been beaten and bloodied, and of the smug smile twisted across his grotesque face.

He thought of his dilemma, of the hard choice between honoring old oaths to the Variden or disregarding them in order to exact revenge upon General Fane, of rejoining his order to fight the enemy in the shadows or galloping to the front to take his vengeance.