The Dame sotfk-3 Read online

  “You were friends with this Delaval?”

  Bransen snorted. “Hardly. His successor wants me dead.”

  Affwin Wi waited a few moments, even glancing back at Merwal Yahna, who offered a slight nod in reply. “You came to learn?” she asked.

  “To confirm that I am correct in how I follow the Book of Jhest,” said Bransen. “And to learn, yes. To learn more about this philosophy that has so guided my life. I have seen the broken end of your sword, and I knew it to be Jhesta Tu. So I came to find you.”

  Affwin Wi began to pace back and forth before him, occasionally glancing at him, deep in contemplation. “You are worthy,” she decided. “You may join with me.”

  Bransen felt as if his heart would pound right through the front of his chest as he considered the implications, the great step forward he had just taken.

  “Your friend will leave now,” Affwin Wi stated.

  The shock of that jolted Bransen from his whirling thoughts. Despite the orders placed upon him, he glanced back to the far edge of the clearing, where Jameston stood between the pair who had captured him.

  “Begone,” Affwin Wi ordered.

  Jameston eyed Bransen.

  “I care not where, but far from us,” Affwin Wi said. “Now. Begone.”

  “I am supposed to watch over the boy,” said Jameston.

  “He is not a boy, he is a man,” said Affwin Wi. “He follows Jhesta Tu. How are you, who are not Jhesta Tu, to watch over him?”

  “I was-”

  “You are not,” Affwin Wi barked. “Only one more time I tell you, begone.”

  The threat in her voice clear to hear, Jameston looked in question at Bransen again. The young warrior took a deep breath and nodded.

  Jameston met Bransen’s eyes for a long moment before returning that nod in farewell and slipping off into the forest.

  Leaving Bransen nervous and very alone and very naked indeed under the withering gaze of Affwin Wi.

  He is powerful with your stones. Are you not interested in protecting your Laird Ethelbert?” Affwin Wi asked succinctly and directly when Father Destros of Chapel Entel balked at arming his monks with sunstones in Laird Ethelbert’s hall for the meeting with the strange Highwayman.

  Father Destros swallowed hard. “Are you not confident of your abilities to protect my laird?” he asked. As soon as the words left his mouth he knew that calling out Affwin Wi on such a matter might be unwise.

  The woman’s hand snapped up quicker than Destros could react, her poking finger right before his eye, meaning that she could have jabbed that finger right through his eye had she chosen to do so.

  “He uses your stones, priest,” she warned. “And he fights as Jhesta Tu. You will protect your leader, and my people will protect him.” She backed away but didn’t take her eyes off the man until she was out in the hallway.

  Father Destros had to remind himself to breathe. She was right, of course. This wasn’t about their growing personal rivalry but about the safety of Laird Ethelbert. He went to his desk and retrieved a sunstone, pocketing several others as well. When he entered Laird Ethelbert’s audience chamber a short while later, he had the sunstone firmly in his grasp. Not only would the gem allow him to counter any use of magic, it would allow for detection of magic as well. Destros figured that he might learn more than a bit about this mysterious Highwayman; he only wished that Affwin Wi hadn’t been the one to deliver the suggestion.

  And certainly not the command.

  Jameston Sequin picked up his pace. He knew that he had already been seen and was being followed, so moving stealthily really didn’t help him much.

  Perhaps they were just ensuring that he continued far from Ethelbert’s holding.

  Jameston wasn’t one to leave things to chance, however, so instead of trying to find a way to hide or outrun them, which he almost certainly could not do, he sought instead a place to face them.

  These were fine warriors, he knew from bitter experience, fast and deceptive. Unlike his usual confrontations, Jameston didn’t believe that the chaos of a forest favored him. He needed something solid to narrow the field of battle.

  He had passed this way the previous night, knew the lay of the area. So he moved quickly to a cluster of abandoned, mostly ruined cottages. Jameston picked a fairly concealed course and stealthily gained the door and slipped inside. He went fast to the far corner and put his back against the solid wooden wall, watching the door.

  He hadn’t long to wait. Within moments a black-clothed figure entered the dimly illuminated, one-room cottage.

  Jameston smiled, thinking it the same woman he had battled earlier that day.

  “You should relax and tell me why you’re following me,” the scout said.

  Caught by surprise, the woman froze in place, slowly swiveling her head to regard the man and his leveled and ready bow.

  She stood straight and turned to face Jameston squarely.

  “Don’t even think about trying to get back out that door,” Jameston said. “You’re leaving in front of me, in case your friends are about and curious. Now, tell me why you’re following me.”

  The woman narrowed her eyes and took a deep breath as if contemplating her options.

  “You won’t get to me, and you won’t get out that door,” Jameston promised. “And you won’t get a dagger or some other bolt into the air before I let fly. I don’t miss. So start explaining why you followed me.”

  “You are to be gone,” she said in a halting command of the language.

  “I was going. Do better.”

  The woman lifted her chin defiantly.

  Jameston pulled back on his bowstring just a bit more. He hated the thought of killing a woman, or anyone for that matter. But he had done so before and would do so again if he had to. Saving his skin was an acceptable reason.

  And saving Bransen’s, he realized. If this woman had come out to kill him, what did that portend for Bransen?

  Jameston’s face tightened, and he drew back his bowstring further. “I’m going to ask you just one more time,” he said grimly.

  B

  ransen was not wearing his mask across his eyes as he paced into Laird Ethelbert’s audience hall beside Affwin Wi, instead letting it hang loosely about his neck. They strode right up to the large chair on which sat the aging laird, a disarming smile on his face.

  “So this is the Highwayman,” Ethelbert began. “Yes, young warrior, I have heard of you even here. I was quite sorry to learn of the death of Laird Prydae.”

  Bransen took the jab calmly. “He was killed of his own actions by his own champion.”

  “Yes, yes, I know the sad tale.”

  “Do you know that he was trying to rape my wife when Bannagran’s axe found his chest?” Bransen asked.

  Affwin Wi’s hand flicked out at Bransen’s side, jabbing his thigh hard. He looked at her; she glared her reply. “Proper respect,” she whispered.

  “That is quite all right, my huntress,” Laird Ethelbert said with a lighthearted laugh. “Better that this one speak the truth in his heart so I may better come to know the truth of him, yes?”

  Affwin Wi gave a curt bow.

  “And I do know enough of Prydae to acknowledge what you claim. Well, let us just say that he was not capable of such an act,” Ethelbert said to Bransen.

  “That did not stop him from trying,” Bransen replied. “Or from falsely condemning her mother”-he glanced to the monk wearing the robes of a father and standing at Ethelbert’s side as he finished-“to the Samhaists.”

  “I surrender, I surrender,” Ethelbert said with a jovial laugh. “I will not replay those events and will not argue with one who was there when I was not. I was saddened by the death of Prydae, a man I had known as an ally in battle. Whether he deserved it or not…” He let it go at that with a shrug.

  Bransen accepted that reasoning with a bow.

  “And you are an interesting mutt, are you not?” Ethelbert said. “You wear on your forehead the gems
tones of an Abellican monk, yet you fight with the techniques-and clothing-of the southern mystics.”

  “My father was of the Order of Blessed Abelle, my mother a Jhesta Tu,” said Bransen.

  “I know that,” Ethelbert said. “I met your father and your mother on their return from Behr. They came through my city two decades ago, and I granted them an audience. It did not end well for them, I assume.”

  Bransen’s face went from a sudden brightening to a dark cloud at the grim reminder of Bran and Sen Wi’s respective fates.

  “I warned your father that the brothers would not be as tolerant as he hoped,” Ethelbert said.

  Bransen felt as if the ground were shifting under his feet. He had come in here full of confidence and determination, and now Laird Ethelbert had maneuvered the conversation to a place that clearly had Bransen on edge. He wanted to hear more of Ethelbert’s encounter with his parents, and he knew that such desire ensured that he would not.

  Ethelbert read him perfectly and quickly deflected the conversation yet again.

  “You know of my struggle with Laird Yeslnik?” he asked.

  “I thought he called himself King Yeslnik,” Bransen replied with enough obvious disdain to draw a large smile from Ethelbert.

  “He can call himself God Yeslnik if it pleases him,” Ethelbert replied. “Because when I kill him it will matter not at all.”

  Bransen didn’t react.

  “So I have met him as you desired,” Ethelbert said to Affwin Wi, suddenly sounding very bored with it all. “What is the purpose? Is he friend, or is he foe?”

  “He states that he is Jhesta Tu,” the woman replied. “He will pledge loyalty to Laird Ethelbert.”

  Bransen looked at her in surprise.

  “Because I am his superior,” Affwin Wi clarified boldly. “And the decision is not his to make.” She turned to regard Bransen directly. “Is that not true?” she asked, invoking a clear test of his loyalty.

  Bransen paused, but only for a moment, before answering, “Yes.”

  “Is there anything more?” asked Ethelbert.

  Affwin Wi studied Bransen for a few moments then said, “Speak your mind freely. This is your last chance to do so.”

  Bransen didn’t know exactly what that might mean. “I am Jhesta Tu,” he explained. “In part. But because of my heritage and my experience, I am more. I have found the promise of my father, the joining-”

  Affwin Wi hit him so hard across the face that he was sitting on the floor before he had even registered the pain of the blow.

  “You are Jhesta Tu, or you are not,” she said while Ethelbert laughed. “Which are you?”

  “I am Jhesta Tu,” Bransen said, lowering his gaze to the floor.

  My arm’s getting tired and I just might let go,” Jameston warned. “You must be gone,” the woman replied.

  “I was going-” Jameston started to say, but he bit it off, suddenly realizing what she really meant. He had tracked them and had found them. He had fought this very woman and believed he was beating her when her friend had intervened.

  He knew of them, which made him an intolerable threat.

  “So that’s what it is, is it?” he said. “You can’t have me wandering on my way knowing what I know.” He gave a little laugh. “Well, I know a lot more now, I expect…”

  He heard the pop behind him, a sharp bang and the splintering of wood, followed by what he thought was a hard punch in his back just behind his right hip.

  Jameston instinctively glanced down, and then he knew. For the nun’chu’ku had blown right through the wall behind him and into his back with such force that Jameston’s leather jerkin was pushed out in the front.

  “Oh, now,” Jameston muttered, realizing that the pole had gone right through him. Already the feeling was leaving his legs, and he was having a hard time drawing breath.

  He looked up at the woman, who stood easily now, smiling at him.

  Jameston managed a nod. Growling, he drew back and sent his arrow at her. She got her arm up with amazing speed, but the arrow bored right through her forearm and into her forehead. She was still smiling when she fell dead to the floor.

  Jameston shuddered, a thousand fires exploding within him as the warrior with the shaven head-it had to be that one, Jameston knew-tugged the nun’chu’ku out of him and back through the wall.

  Jameston was sitting when the fierce warrior came around the front and entered through the door. The scout wanted to put his bow up for one last shot, for one chance to kill this vicious man, but when he lifted his left arm, he only then realized that he wasn’t even holding the bow anymore, that it was on the floor at his feet.

  Merwal Yahna crouched over the dead woman, then rose and glanced at Jameston. He would come over and finish the job, Jameston figured, but surprisingly the man just snorted and turned away.

  Jameston watched as the warrior cradled his fallen friend, then carried her out of the house.

  And as he left, the darkness began to close in on Jameston Sequin.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Bloodletting

  Mcwigik leaned his elbows on the top of the small barrel boat tower, staring at the distant fires and candles twinkling in windows. So many lights. More than Mcwigik had ever seen, more than he had ever imagined possible. For a hundred years he had looked across the waters of Mithranidoon, where even a single firelight was an oddity. For many years of life before that, the largest collection of people together he had ever seen was the town of Hard Rocks on the Weathered Isles.

  But even that place, once thought impressive, couldn’t have been one-twentieth the size of this!

  “Got to be Palmaristown,” Bikelbrin said, coming up beside him. “We’re at the mouth o’ the river, and that’s where Shiknickel said it’d be.”

  “We get ten of us boys together, and we call it a town,” Mcwigik replied, shaking his hairy head. “Thirty and we call it a city, a hundred and it’s a kingdom.”

  “Lot o’ people in there,” Bikelbrin agreed.

  “Lot o’ blood,” his friend reminded.

  “We get killed to death in there, and there’s none to be burying our hearts.”

  “Bah, but we won’t be knowin’ that anyway!” Mcwigik said with a laugh, and he and Bikelbrin clapped each other on the shoulders.

  The powrie shiver stayed offshore as the lights went down in the city, and only then did the eager dwarves resume their pedaling, moving very slowly and quietly. With a hundred thirty warriors among all the boats, they figured they’d find themselves outnumbered a hundred to one or more.

  Dreams of berets shining brightly enough to light up the night carried them on their way.

  Bransen sat on the roof of the inn in Ethelbert dos Entel, his legs tightly crossed before him, his hands on his bent knees and his eyes skyward, basking in the contemplative light of a million stars. His thoughts were out there and within himself all at once, a meditative state of serenity in the face of the great questions of purpose and being. To face the many questions of his future meant that he needed the cleansing experience of being fully in the present, of recognizing his mind-body connection and putting that in context with his greater connection to the universe around him. He needed to find that moment of perfect, unfettered clarity, that complete sensation of peace.

  But the stunning revelations and twists of the last day stayed with him, nagging him with doubts, particularly on where Cadayle might fit into his new allegiance to Affwin Wi. She had dismissed Jameston out of hand; what might that portend for Cadayle?

  Bransen took a deep breath and threw away that unsettling thought. He forced himself back inside his ki-chi-kree, his line of life energy, and then sent that line spiritually up into the dark and starry sky.

  A different sensation tugged at him, though, and suddenly and unexpectedly, a feeling that something, somehow, was amiss.

  Bransen interrupted his meditative journey to refocus on this disturbance, this ill feeling. It had direction, like a cry of pain, o
ut in the dark night.

  Bransen let his soul slide through the soul stone of the brooch and escape his corporeal form. He started away spiritually, but hesitantly, until he felt again that strange sensation that something was terribly wrong.

  Then he moved with purpose, willing his noncorporeal form over the city’s wall and out across the empty fields to the edge of a forest he had traversed that very morning.

  The docks were quiet, those few guards on duty either asleep or gambling, throwing bones against a warehouse wall. One or another would occasionally glance at the harbor to check the masts of the few ships in port.

  Barrel boats didn’t have masts.

  The powrie craft came in slowly, their underwater rams prodding the sand below the wharves so that even as the dwarves climbed from their craft and slowly walked across the top arc of those rams, they remained out of sight to the distracted guards up on the boardwalk.

  “Beat that point!” one gambling sentry shouted triumphantly as the bones rolled a strong number.

  The words had barely left his mouth when a mallet cracked down atop his head, breaking his skull and shattering every bone in his neck.

  “As ye asked!” a dwarf explained.

  How the other four guards started to scramble! Started, but never even made their feet, as a score of powries, weapons flashing and swung with bloodlust, fell over them. They cried out for their companions on the docks but those sleeping or inattentive men and women were already dead, powries already wetting their berets in freshly spilled blood.

  The dwarves methodically formed into six units, each crew as a battle group. They used the very bones the men had been rolling to determine which of the six would stay behind and watch the boats for the first forays.

  “Not to worry,” many told the losers. “Plenty to kill.”

  Five battle groups moved up into sleeping, unwitting Palmaristown, a hundred weapons, a hundred serrated knives to open veins.

  Like a plague of hungry rats they roved through the town, sweeping through houses and tenements, at one point overwhelming a group still drinking and shouting in one of the nearby taverns.