Bared Blade (14 page)

Now, I was only getting maybe one word in three, if that. So, it took me quite a while to make sense of it all. But when I finally did, and heard the bit about the girl, I immediately thought of the missing young Reyna. So I slipped away from there right quick. Then I turned around and hurried back down the path the way I’d come.

VoS clenched four fists and briefly shut as many eyes, and it was easy to see that the memory hurt her.

It wasn’t what I wanted to do. No, not by a long haul. What I
wanted
to do was rush in and kill the lot of them. I probably would have tried, too, if I’d thought I had any real hope of managing it, but these Others had brought down eleven Dyads already and with only a loss of four of their own number. I
knew
that any attempt I made then might as well come with a suicide note.

Even that might not have been enough to stop me if it weren’t for the girl. What if it was Reyna? What if she had the Kothmerk now? Maybe I could still finish out the mission. Maybe I could make all those deaths matter.

When I got close to where I’d left my horses, I slowed down and started moving extra quietlike. I still didn’t know what a durathian road might be, but if they were trying to
get ahead of the girl and they thought she was one of ours, they might well have come back to the battlefield looking for her. It was a good thing I did, too, because I found three of them standing around one of my horses looking angry and jibbering their jabber.

I listened long enough to determine that the rest had gone off, a-hunting after my second horse and the girl who’d taken it. Following the tracks or something, it sounded like, though I can’t say for sure. There were a lot more strange words involved and a good deal of pointing and what sounded like swearing. I figured that was all I needed to know, so I got my angles lined up and I used my battle wands to punch nice big holes in all three of them at once.

They’re the toughest bastards I’ve ever seen, I’ll give them that. The two I got through the heart made it halfway to me before they went down for good. And the one I’d only drilled through the lungs was practically on top of my Vala when Stel beheaded her. Thumb-sized hole running from armpit to armpit and she was still going strong right up till the second she lost her head. I wanted to ride then, but figured I couldn’t afford the noise, so I took the mission purse and as much food as I could carry, unsaddled my horse, loosed the hobbles and headed out very quietly.

The dead Durkoth had all been pointing back along the road, so that’s the way I went. I’m not sure how the Others were traveling, but they left an obvious enough trail, a series of parallel lines running lengthwise along the road where the grade was smoother and straighter than any human would ever have made it. I also don’t know how fast they were moving, or Reyna on my stolen horse either, but I kept along at a nice steady march from a couple hours after sunup till near nightfall without catching anyone up.

I was just dropping off to sleep when it occurred to me that with the timing and all, the girl would pretty much have had to pass me on that trail I’d followed to the Durkoth krith. That meant there was a good chance she’d seen me coming up, and had decided not to flag me down. That, plus the fact that I hadn’t seen her, even though I was looking
out for anyone coming my way, left me feeling more than a little hollow.

Add in that she’d gotten past the Durkoth guards to steal the Kothmerk from them, and the way she’d somehow managed to avoid getting killed during the battle, and you had to start asking questions. How did she get past the guards? How did she avoid getting killed in an ambush that had taken the lives of nearly a dozen of the finest Dyads I knew? And, further back: Where had she really come from? What exactly was the disaster she’d fled in the southwest? How the hell had she gotten this far without either the Durkoth or me catching her? Etc.

I didn’t sleep very well that night, and the next day only added more questions. I found my missing horse after about an hour’s walk. She was lying dead in a little clearing off to one side of the road with her saddle and bags in a heap not too far off. There were smooth neat lines running along the ground all over the place, and two of those weird burial diamonds. My first thought was that the Durkoth had caught up with Reyna, and by some miracle she’d managed to take two of them with her.

But a quick look around changed my mind. First off, there was no crumpled little body, and if the earlier battlefield had shown me anything, it was that the Durkoth didn’t much care what happened to human corpses. Second, I followed flies to a couple of huge purple blood patches about forty feet apart. Both had the look of ambush killings, like someone had gotten their throat slit or the big artery in the groin opened up without ever getting a chance to fight back.

Once I was finished with looking around the clearing, I went back to the road. There was another set of lines leading onward. Since I was pretty sure I’d fallen behind, I resaddled my horse and mounted up, with Vala riding pillion. About midafternoon I hit a crossroads where all the trails turned and headed toward Tien. As you’ve probably guessed, I never did catch up to the girl, though I did run into two wounded Durkoth on the way to Tien—too hurt to
travel I think—and one of those nearly did for me before I gutted her.

“You really believe one young girl managed to kill two Durkoth and do all those other things?” asked Triss. “How?”

VoS shrugged Vala’s shoulders. “I have no idea. Nor how she survived that first battle, or any of the other fantastic things I’ve ascribed to her. But I’m pretty sure that’s what happened, and what evidence I’ve found has tended to support the idea. I may not have found Reyna, but I did turn up ten more Durkoth graves scattered along the roadside between there and here, along with the corpses of a score or so of what looked to be innocent bystanders.”

“Maybe it wasn’t Reyna that did all that,” I said as I wrapped up what was left of my dinner. “It could have been a third party as yet unknown.” I couldn’t help but think of the dead girl that Fei’s sergeant Zishin had found—the one with a couple of Elite standing over her corpse—and wonder if that wasn’t the missing Reyna.

“A third party who just happened along at that exact moment?” asked VoS. “One who sounded to the Durkoth like a little girl running away? Who also removed Reyna’s body from the battlefield, or did something else to get rid of it? And all without leaving any other clues to point to his or her existence?”

“There is that,” I said. “Maybe she was a mage of some sort, or had help.”

I didn’t say it, but killing from ambush like that would be right up the alley of one of my kind. And now that I’d encountered Devin, I knew a number of my brethren had turned their coats at the fall of the temple and might well be willing to take on that kind of job. But I didn’t want to share any thoughts on that just yet, not till I had more information. Not about that and not about the dead girl. Not till I was absolutely sure about who was on the side of justice here.

“A mage I’d be more willing to believe,” said VoS.

“We’ve discussed it amongst ourselves,” said Vala. “Stel likes the unknown allies theory, but I don’t see it. There’s
never been any evidence for her being anything other than alone. I think she might have been a much older mage just pretending to be a girl.”

“How would she manage that?” asked Triss. “Illusion’s all right if you’re dealing with the mageblind, but I’ve never heard of a Dyad having that problem.”

“We don’t,” said Stel. “If Reyna was wrapped in an active spell Vala would have seen it, or if not Vala, one of the other mage-halves.”

“But there is a way…” Vala started, but trailed off when Stel gave her a hard look.

“We are
not
going to talk about that,” said Stel.

“
T
alk
about what?” I leaned forward on my half barrel curiously, but Stel just gave me a stony look and stayed clammed up.

“Might as well just tell him,” said VoS, after a dozen or so heartbeats. “It’s not like he doesn’t know more than enough to get us court-martialed and hanged if he wanted to already.”

“But no one outside the Dyadary is supposed to even know the spell exists,” protested Stel. “It’s a state secret.”

Vala shrugged. “And one we’re almost certainly going to have to use after the disaster at the tavern. Even if we waited till Aral left to do something and then worked the change, it’s not something we’d be able to hide from him. Not if we’re going to keep working together.”

“All right,” said Stel, “but for the record, I’m really not happy about this.”

Vala winked at her bond-mate. “So write me up when we get home. Maybe they’ll let you roam free while they’ve got me locked in the stockade.”

Stel rolled her eyes in a way that suggested this was a
common tease between the two of them. Then she shrugged and gestured for Vala to continue.

“There’s a spell we use in the Dyadary that will permanently alter your appearance.” Vala grimaced. “We call it the bonewright, because that’s what it does. Within certain limits that is.”

“By which she means to complain to the unjust gods that there’s no way to make her significantly taller,” Stel said with a little smirk.

“I’ve never heard of anything like that,” I said. “But that’s probably not a huge surprise. While the goddess lived, she clouded the minds of those who saw her Blades, so that we could neither be drawn nor accurately described. There was never any need for us to significantly alter our appearance, or even to think about it.”

“I don’t think
anyone
knows about this outside of Kodamia,” said Vala. “It’s extraordinarily painful for the one experiencing the change, and losing control of the process is usually fatal, and always disfiguring. Most mages simply couldn’t manage it. The only reason it’s come into regular practice amongst the Dyadary is that we sorcerers can cede control of our bodies over to our lovely and charming familiars.”

Stel raised her eyebrows. “I think you misspoke there. Don’t you mean, oh familiar-mine, that your masters can control your puny little bodies, while you do the petty conjuring?”

“My bond-mate might be right,” said Vala. “About my making a mistake, I mean. I’m afraid I have to retract the
charming
part of the description of our familiars, at least in Stel’s case. Though she is still lovely.” Vala blew Stel a kiss.

“You’re not trying to say that Reyna is one half of a renegade Dyad, are you?” Triss lifted his head from my lap and looked more closely at the pair. “Because that makes no sense whatsoever.”

“No, of course not,” replied VoS. “But it’s possible, however unlikely, that some other sorcerer got hold of the
bonewright and had a familiar that could handle half of the process. One of the greater dragons or a vampire perhaps. Something with a lot of power and a good mind at any rate. Or, maybe there’s some sort of familiar that has some way of mitigating the agony.”

“Or,” interjected Vala, “—and this is my theory—it’s possible that a sufficiently disciplined mage could simply handle the pain. That they wouldn’t need help from their familiar to manage the thing.”

Stel put a hand up and pretended to whisper to me behind its cover, “She has delusions of mage-grandeur sometimes. Just pretend to agree with her.”

Triss flipped a wing up in a perfect mirror of Stel’s gesture. “Mine does that, too. Do you think it’s a flaw inherent to those born with the mage gift? Or is it learned somehow?”

“I don’t know about Aral, but poor Vala’s
always
been a little off, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s too bad,” said Triss. “If they’d learned it, there might be some way to train them out of it. Snacks for better behavior, or a sharp swat on the nose whenever it happens, or something.…”

Vala marched over to me, slipped her hand through my elbow, and tucked herself in tight against my side. “I’ve never been so insulted in all my life.” She was short enough that she hardly had to stoop to make the connection, though I was sitting. “Take me away from all this, won’t you please?”

My sense of humor might be a bit rusty, but it wasn’t yet dead, so I grinned and nodded. “Of course, my lady. Where should we go?”

“Be careful there, Aral,” said Stel. “She’s a dangerous one once she gets her hooks into you. Deadly cute, and too smart by half. I should know.”

“Oh, I would never do anything to hurt Aral,” said Vala, laying her head on my shoulder and blinking up at me faux-adoringly. “For he is a fellow mage and, like me, he clearly suffers under the crushing burden of a too-insolent familiar.”

With Vala pressed so close, I couldn’t help but notice the smell of her hair and the warmth of her body. It was the first time that I’d really thought of her as a human woman rather than half of a Dyad, which was the next thing to some sort of exotic creature from another dimension in my book. It was a rather alarming realization, and I felt my face flushing.

I decided to brazen it out and pretend nothing had happened, but the rather smug look that suddenly appeared on Vala’s face suggested that I was perhaps pulling it off less well than I’d hoped.