Lost Covenant: A Widdershins Adventure (9 page)

As she'd suspected from outside on the street, she found herself in a smithy, recently used—judging by the aromas hanging in the air and the lingering warmth of the forge—but now closed up for the night. Cinder- and soot-choked hearth, which Shins was fairly certain should have been cleaned out before now; anvils of various sizes atop old wooden stumps; racks of tools, against the walls and free-standing both. One row of tools even hung high above the hearth, perhaps older implements rarely used but not yet deserving of disposal.

A step on the dirt, a second on the anvil, and again Shins was airborne. Twisting to the horizontal, she landed on the sloped chimney above the hearth, slipping beneath the dangling tools without disturbing a single handle. There, braced with one hand and one foot against the edge to keep herself from sliding, at least partly hidden by shadow and steel, she waited.

The first of her pursuers followed through the window a moment later, firing a flintlock blindly over the sill, presumably to ensure she wasn't waiting immediately to one side. He clambered through and moved toward the door, unbarring it for three more of his companions, while a fifth also availed himself of Widdershins's makeshift ingress. All were clearly typical bruisers and underground muscle. She'd met more than enough of their type in her years to recognize the breed.

Only five.
Either she'd overestimated, or more waited outside in case she made a break for it. Better to assume the latter.

“A few seconds more…” So under her breath, nobody would have heard even had they been living in her throat at the time. “Just one more…”

The thugs began to fan out, pistols or brutal knives in hand, peering and poking into any obvious hiding spots….

Widdershins kicked, launching herself with both her free foot and the one that had been bracing her. Both fists closed on the rack of tools, toppling it from atop the forge. Propelled by her momentum,
Olgun-augmented strength, and its own impressive weight, it ripped free of its flimsy bolts and plummeted into the room. The clatter of toppling tools, a veritable orchestra from hell, wasn't quite deafening enough to obscure the abortive scream and breaking bones of the ruffian on whom they landed.

He'd probably recover, but Shins wouldn't have wanted to be him for the next…ever.

Attention snared by the toppling rack, utterly unprepared for Widdershins's speed, the others might as well have been wrapped in cobweb. A handspring launched her from the heap of metal before the tools had even begun to settle. She felt her calves close around the head of the next nearest thug; a quick twist, hurling herself to the side, yanked him from his feet to bounce his head rather painfully off the closest anvil. Shins swore his eyes actually rolled in opposite directions before closing in unconsciousness.

And then there were three
….

She landed in a crouch, one hand on the floor, facing back the way she'd come—and facing, too, a trio of bruisers, all of whom looked very much as though they'd expected a bunny and snagged a bear.

The first to react, a scraggly beanpole of a man, raised a broad-barrelled flintlock—a situation Widdershins and Olgun had faced so often she scarcely even had to whisper his name. Power surged, powder sparked, and the weapon discharged itself a heartbeat early, the lead ball gauging a chunk out of a stump before flattening itself in the wood.

Shins straightened upright and casually began slapping the dirt from her gloves as she asked, “Can we call this a night, yet, boys?”

Albeit at a much more wary pace than before, all three stepped toward her.

“Thought not,” she sighed.

Widdershins jammed the toe of one boot beneath a hammer that had bounced loose from the fallen rack, kicked it up into the air,
snagged it with one hand, and—with yet another boost from her own personal god—hurled it across the smithy.

At which point there were
three
thugs collapsed and bleeding, and only two still standing.

The first lunged at her, stabbing at her gut with his fighting knife. She spun past, deflecting it with the rapier she knew her opponents hadn't even seen her draw. Steel scraped on steel and she was behind him, lunging not in his direction but at the other. Circling around, clearly having planned to get behind her, he could only gawp, caught flat-footed, as the tip of her sword punched into his side. Not deep, almost certainly not enough to kill, but
more
than sufficient to put him down.

Widdershins came out of her spin, ready to parry once more, and found no need. All she saw was the sole of one boot as he fled back through the door, and that only for the barest instant before he slammed it shut behind him.

“Ha!” Widdershins knelt beside the wounded man, reached out to grab a handful of shirt to wipe his blood from her rapier. “Did all right for ourselves, didn't we, Olg—?”

A ceramic decanter, roughly the size of Widdershins's head, hurtled through the window to shatter against the stone of the hearth—and from it burst a cloud of russet dust that spread rapidly through the air of the smithy.

Shins felt as though she'd just attempted to inhale the detritus coating the inside of the forge. Her throat closed up as though someone had stuck a cork in it. Only a rasped appeal to Olgun enabled her to breathe at all; she felt the swelling fade beneath a breath of his magics, not much but just enough. Her eyes stung, beginning to tear, as did the insides of her nose and mouth. Gasping, choking, hand pressed tight to her face, she stumbled toward the door…

Reaching it just in time to hear something else—something that sounded very much, but not precisely, like the first ceramic projectile—disintegrate against the wood.

A musty, rotten stench, foul enough for the thief to smell despite barely breathing at all, accompanied a gooey sheen. It seeped around the wood,
through
the wood, which began visibly, if only slightly, to rot.

To rot…And, as though it had absorbed the moisture of a dozen autumns at once, to swell. Widdershins didn't have to hear the creak of the door against the frame to know that she wouldn't be opening it any time soon.

“Figs…”

Or at least, that's what she
thought
she said. It came out as such a jagged croak, even she couldn't be certain.

No choice, then. Back to the window, no matter who or what waited outside. She was staggering by the time she made it across the smithy once more. Her arms shook and threatened to give out as she hauled herself bodily over the sill. Still, when she collapsed in a heap in the road outside, huddled, hacking, vomiting, it was a relief compared to what had come before.

“Jean says we should've shot you as you came through the window.” It took her a moment to register the voice. Deep, sneering, somehow slimy; if the sludge from the bed of a stagnant swamp were to suddenly speak, it might well sound like this. “But I wanted to see you for myself. See who's dumb enough to come looking for us but scary enough to put five men down. Right now, I have to say, I'm only seeing the first half.”

Behind her violent coughs, Widdershins almost smiled—not at anything the stranger had said, though she was always thrilled to be underestimated, but at the faint charge running through her skin, her lungs. Now that they were out of that hellish cloud, Olgun's power should enable her to recover a
lot
faster than these people would expect. Just keep them talking a little while…

Blinking away the tears, she achingly raised her head.

And would have sworn, initially, that she was looking at a ghost. A big, ugly, rancid-smelling ghost.

Brock?!

But no. As her vision began to clear, Widdershins realized this very much was not the Finders’ Guild enforcer who had made her life so miserable, had brutally assaulted her best friend—and whose dead body she'd seen with her own eyes a year gone by. He
was
, however, very much of a kind with the late and utterly unlamented Brock.

He was a brick wall mistakenly born into a man's body—so tall that Shins almost felt the need to take a break while looking up from his feet to his head, broad enough of shoulder to stand in yoke and haul a wagon under his own power.

His waist, however, was oddly slender for his size, his neck
just
long enough to be notably peculiar. Not a brick wall, then, she decided. The offspring of Brock and a large snake with especially poor standards.

Scattered behind him were a half dozen or so thugs and bruisers, all clearly cut from the same cloth (or perhaps burlap) as the men she'd ambushed.

“Hello,” he said, smirking down at her. “I am Ivon. This is Fingerbone.”

Only then did Widdershins notice the other man, standing behind Ivon—“in the lee of Ivon” would have been more apt—but ahead of the others. All she could make out was fancy clothing now gone shabby, hanging loosely from a dark-skinned body so hideously gaunt he might have inspired a skeleton to eat a loaf of bread.

And it was then she realized that what she'd mistaken for a faint ringing in her ears, perhaps caused by whatever substance they'd tossed into the smithy, was in fact this “Fingerbone,” sniggering constantly through a phlegm-coated throat.

“Now that we've been gentlemanly enough to present ourselves,” Ivon continued, “who the shit-soaked burbling hell are
you
?”

“Oh, yes. Very gentlemanly. Refined, even.” She still sounded as though she were speaking
through
an irate bullfrog, but at least
her words were intelligible again. She gave brief thought to lying, decided there was no real point. “Widdershins.”

“Widder-what, now?”

“Widdershins. My name.”

“What the hell kind of name is ‘Widdershins’?”

She waved vaguely with one hand, allowing it to flop, appearing far more dazed and bleary than she truly was. “What kind of name is…um, is…?”

“Fingerbone,” the wall-snake-man sneered.

“Oh, no, I meant ‘Ivon.’” Shins offered him a pert little smile. “By the way, are you at all bothered by the fact that you just suffocated four of your own men in there? Almost makes one question your commitment to your people, yes?”

Ivon's sneer slipped and slid into a snarl. Fingers began tapping at the hilt of the weapon slung at his waist—not a hammer, as Brock had carried, but what appeared to be a massive chopping blade, as much forester's tool as armament. If the average dagger could expect to grow up into the average sword, this was the adult form of the standard kitchen cleaver.

“Isn't lethal.” Fingerbone swayed out from behind his presumed boss, his words the scratch and screech one might expect from a creature so corpse-like. Shins saw, now, that he dragged behind a decrepit wood wagon, clearly sized for a child's toy. Inside it sat a number of ceramic vessels, all similar to the one that had released the toxic powder. “Ugly, choking, tearing, gasping. But not killing.” He tittered—a high, ear-grating, brain-scratching sound. “Not killing.”

“Most of the time,” Ivon added. “Long as you're in good health. Any of my boys dead in there, well…Probably weren't all that useful anyway, were they?”

“That's why the ‘Thousand Crows,’ then? Left that many people behind?”

She hadn't been
certain
, of course—they could have been some other gang, having caught wind of her activity—but it had seemed a
fairly safe bet. Especially given the peculiar magic of the smothering dust and whatever they'd done to the smithy door. When Ivon didn't correct her, she took that as confirmation enough.

“I'm going to ask you one time,” the gang leader said, all trace of false amity dropping away, fist now firmly clenched on his sword. “Then we're going to take you somewhere private and encourage you to be a little more forthcoming. Think a lot of my crows'd like it better the second way, but it's your call for another ten seconds.
Why have you been asking around about us?
”

Because my plan had been to locate and single out one of you—or knock a bunch of you silly, then single out someone who came
looking
for you—and follow him back to wherever it is you loiter to figure out if you're the ones poisoning the Delacroix fields, and if so, why.
Which, while truthful, was not an answer that Widdershins felt would go over particularly well, or do her much good in the long run.

Seven-to-one odds, and she wasn't quite back to her best, yet. But she'd faced worse, and they couldn't possibly be expecting…

“No, we're not running!” she hissed in response to Olgun's hesitant query. “I want answers so I can get
out
of this stupid town! So…You ready?”

The god's answer was nervous, true, but also carried a strong sense of anticipation.

Widdershins tensed, gathering herself to move…

Fingerbone shrieked, something between a scream and a manic chortle. Just about as swiftly as Shins had ever seen anyone move (without divine assistance) he yanked a decanter from the wagon without even looking back at it and hurled the projectile her way.

Shins had no idea what had given her away—perhaps nothing, and the apparent madman was gifted with some lunatic insight—and for the nonce, it didn't remotely matter. Legs uncoiling like a goosed viper, she hurled herself aside just before the ceramic struck and shattered.

At the corners of her vision, as she rolled, she watched the filth-gray sludge begin to splash—and then to congeal and grow rigid, similar to hardening wax. She'd no way of knowing what the stuff
was
, but the effects were clear enough; had she been even a second slower, she'd be partly encased in it. Helpless. Likely for only a moment, until she broke her way free, but a moment with Ivon and his people was more than sufficient.

Now they were ready, knew she wasn't nearly as incapacitated as she should have been. Now the nearby doorways disgorged additional Crows, until they numbered almost thrice their starting strength. Now Ivon had his brutal chopper drawn and held aloft, and Fingerbone was already reaching for another pot.

“And then again,” she murmured, “we could run.”

The young thief took to her heels, through a city she didn't know, a pack of murderous thugs—and possibly one sorcerer—baying and clacking blades as they gave chase.